Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2013

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

• A Renoir oil painting that had been stolen from a home in Setagaya in 2000 was sold at an auction in London for £1.05 million. Officials at Sotheby’s say they had no idea the painting was hot and vowed to look into the matter.
• A 42-year-old Detroit native has become the first foreign firefighter in the history of Ibaraki.
• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hosted dignitaries from about 40 Muslim nations for an iftar dinner—the traditional meal that breaks the sunrise-to-sunset fast during Ramadan.
• South Korean officials expressed displeasure with the results of a Cabinet Office survey that found 60.7 percent of Japanese view the Takeshima islets as Japan’s territory.

POLICE BLOTTER

• Cops in Saitama arrested a junior high school teacher after discovering that his teaching license had been revoked following a previous bust for child prostitution.
• A city worker and his wife were arrested in Miyazaki for demanding money from a former classmate and, when the man refused, forcing him to cut off his own finger.
• Officials at the NPA say the number of elderly crime victims has more than doubled during the past decade.
• At the same time, the number of crimes committed by seniors in 2012 accounted for nearly 17 percent of all criminal cases.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

• Three Tokyo-area college students are heading to the Solomon Islands to help search for the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in the Battle of Guadalcanal.
• Meanwhile, a group of private citizens has traveled to Micronesia to hunt for the wreckage of Imperial Japanese Navy ships and subs sunk during World War II.
• A documentary about the effort to evacuate 400,000 books from central Tokyo in the closing days of the war was screened in Chiyoda-ku.
• Sentence of the Week: “It was only 11 years ago that Hideaki Kato, a 39-year-old doctor in Yokohama, discovered he had been conceived with donated sperm.” (via The Japan News)

BREAKTHROUGHS

• Seismologists at the University of Tokyo have developed a method of “accurately forecasting the probability of large aftershocks within about three hours of an earthquake.”
• A team of scientists at Osaka University has developed a flu-detection device that takes just 15 minutes to identify the presence of the new H1N1 virus.
• Researchers at the Hyogo College of Medicine have isolated a protein that is thought to play “significant roles” in causing a type of dermatitis that affects as many as 20 percent of children in developed countries.
• Police chiefs in Aichi have unveiled a program that allows two officers who are returning from childcare leave “to share a post meant for one person.”

FEELING THE HEAT

• TMG officials conducted a cloud-seeding experiment on the Tama River that produced 11 millimeters of rain in an hour.
• Authorities at the MPD dispatched an arson squad to the Democratic Republic of Congo to try and figure out what caused a fire at the Japanese embassy in Kinshasa.
• A firefighting drill in Shiga turned tragic when flames from a tray of accelerant sprayed into the crowd. Ten people were injured, including two young girls who witnesses say “became fireballs.”
• Bottom Story of the Week: “Cool Footbath a New Attraction for Visitors to Chikugo Hot Spring” (via Mainichi Japan)

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