Intermediate

Right after returning from the three-day trip to China, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed the Indian leader Narendra Modi to his vacation home at the foot of Mount Fuji.

They agreed on resuming a currency swap accord to the tune of $75 billion and more than ¥300 billion in yen loans to finance India’s infrastructure projects including a high-speed railway using Japan’s Shinkansen system.

Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.

In 1989, physics researcher Jim Berners-Lee began writing code for what would become the World Wide Web. Thirty years on, and Berners-Lee’s invention has more than justified the lofty goals implied by its name. But with that scale has come a host of troubles.

The Japanese government and the bank of Japan have announced that they will renew the ¥10,000, ¥5,000 and ¥1,000 banknotes in 2024.

When Addy Tritt was 25 years old, she went to her local Payless shoe store in Hays, Kansas, a few years ago. She didn’t intend to walk out with the last of the store’s inventory.

The store was going out of business and had slashed its prices. When the last 204 pairs of footwear dropped to $1 each, Tritt figured she could buy some and donate them somewhere. 

“My pile just kept growing bigger and bigger,” said Tritt. She finally went up to the sales associate and asked, “Can you get me a deal on all of these shoes?”

In the early 1800s in England, football and rugby existed as different variations of the same game. Aristocratic boys came up with the shortened terms “rugger” and “soccer” to differentiate between Rugby Football (from Rugby School, in Warwickshire, England) and Association Football.

The annual Australian Football League Mark of the Year competition is a sporting award that celebrates each season's best "mark." A mark is the action of a player cleanly catching a ball that has been kicked and has traveled more than 15 meters through the air without hitting the ground.

A spectacular mark, also known as a "specky," is a mark in Australian rules football that typically involves a player jumping up on the back of another player.

It was only about 40 years ago that plastic bags became standard at U.S. grocery stores. This also made them standard in sewers, landfills, rivers and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They clog drains and cause floods, litter landscapes and kill wildlife. The national movement to get rid of them is gaining steam, with more than 240 cities and counties passing laws that ban or tax them since 2007. But these bans may be hurting the environment more than helping it.

The Japanese city of Osaka has been selected to host the World Expo in 2025, an event expected to draw millions of visitors and showcase the local economy and culture. The theme for the 2025 World Expo is finding solutions to challenges facing humanity.

What if you could live longer just by doing more of what you love to do most?

It's an attractive theory that finds its evidence in Ogimi, a community on the island of Okinawa that's nicknamed the Village of Longevity because its residents have the highest life expectancy in the world. They also largely share a devotion to a Japanese philosophy known as ikigai, a concept that is, at times, used synonymously with purpose, passion, meaning, mission, vocation and drive.

The minister in charge of cybersecurity said he doesn't use computers.

Yoshitaka Sakurada, who just last week was criticized for stumbling over basic questions during Diet deliberations, found himself once again in hot water Wednesday after making it known that he doesn't use computers even though he is a deputy head of the government panel on cybersecurity and is tasked with overseeing policies on such matters.

Think about what you look for when you’re deciding on the perfect travel destination. Is it rich history? Cultural experiences? Lots of delicious food or shopping opportunities? Comfortable and unique places to stay? Or, perhaps, you just want to go somewhere with truly breathtaking views that you can’t get anywhere else in the world.

Guess what? You can find all of this and more in Japan.

The internet today isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee pictured when he invented the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago.

Berners-Lee says the web is “at a tipping point” as it faces threats like market concentration, data breaches, user frustration with ads and privacy, hate speech and so-called “fake news.”

“If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said humanity is going to do a good job with this,” he said. “If we connect all these people together, they are such wonderful people they will get along. I was wrong.”

An attendant at a popular garden in the heart of Tokyo has cost the facility millions of yen because he was “too frightened” to ask foreign visitors to pay the admission fee.

Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan has been dealing with one it didn’t foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior. Their crimes are usually minor, with 9 in 10 senior women being convicted of shoplifting.

In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients—even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives, creating a difference of more than 20 years in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.

Nagoya-based husband-and-wife vlogging duo Rachel and Jun Yoshizuki run the YouTube channel Rachel and Jun. Their on-the-ground accounts of daily life in Japan have been viewed more than 200 million times.

Two scientists who discovered how to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer won the 2018 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. James Allison, of the US, and Tasuku Honjo, of Japan, shared the 9m Swedish kronor ($1m/¥113m) prize.

The scientists’ groundbreaking work on the immune system has paved the way for a new class of cancer drugs that are already dramatically changing outcomes for patients. It is the first time the development of a cancer therapy has been recognised with a Nobel prize.

Steep tariffs, challenging geography and government subsidies come to mind when we think about the barriers to international trade. But there are lots of different languages in the world, and translation problems can slow things down, too.

The European Union and Japan signed a monumental trade deal in, July 2018, eliminating nearly all tariffs between the entities in one of the world’s largest free-trade deals. The pact, signed in Tokyo, covers a third of the global economy.

The agreement is in stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s trade war and alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the leaders didn’t mention him by name, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker distanced themselves from Trump’s tactics in a press conference following the deal.