Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2014

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

• Cops in Osaka arrested a father and son who spent the last 15 years touring the country with a film projector showing unauthorized screenings of Anpanman flicks to elementary school students.
• German shoppers will get their first taste of Uniqlo early next month when the Japanese retailer debuts a store in Berlin.
• The Cabinet Office says Japan’s population will stay above 100 million—but only if the country “accepts a large number of immigrants and the birthrate improves.”
• Officials at the MPD—along with counterparts in Ibaraki, Gunma, Gifu and Fukuoka—say they’ve deployed a facial recognition system featuring a camera that “can instantly spot a particular person in a crowd.”

MOVING ON

• Officials at struggling Sony Corp have sold their former headquarters in Shinagawa for ¥15 billion.
• Which shouldn’t really be surprising, as the company recently dumped a Manhattan skyscraper for $1.1 billion.
• The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 69-year-old Hironobu Takesaki, said he will retire at the end of the month due to health reasons.
• All Nippon Airways suspended its mileage-club tie-up with Apple after discovering that ¥650,000 worth of points were “illicitly converted” at the iTunes store.

TANGLED WEBS

• It was reported that US-based drug traffickers are running a scam in which they send marijuana-filled parcels to people in Japan, then tell the recipients that the packages were sent accidentally and ask them to forward them to a different address.
• A mugger in Osaka who stuffed his victims’ empty wallets and purses into plastic bags and tossed them into a pond was busted after one of the bags floated to the surface.
• Japanese researchers have found that a stroke-prevention drug called cilostazol is helpful in slowing the progression of dementia.
• Authorities in the seaside Kanagawa town of Zushi passed an ordinance “prohibiting loud music and beach huts at night.”

SIC TRANSIT

• A court in Osaka ordered the former owner of the once-ubiquitous Nova language school to pay ¥19 million in damages to former students.
• Naoshi Shinozaki, 58, became the first Japanese to win the R. Townley Paton Award, which is presented annually by a US medical group to ophthalmologists who have “made an outstanding contribution to corneal transplantation.”
• The shinkansen ride from Tokyo to Osaka will get three minutes faster next year after JR Tokai raises the speed limit on the route from 270kph to 285kph.
• JAXA successfully put into orbit a satellite that specializes in forecasting “abnormal weather conditions such as deluge and drought.”

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, Jiji, The Tokyo Reporter, The Mainichi, The Japan News, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo