News Blast

L.A.'s Little Tokyo looks to save struggling newspaper

Mickey Komai opens one of the leather-bound books stored in his Little Tokyo office and delicately turns the yellowed pages filled with Japanese and English script. Here in the pages of the bilingual newspaper his family has run for most of a century is the tumultuous story of Japanese Americans in Southern California. The Rafu Shimpo covered acts to ban Japanese from owning land, bringing over brides and eventually immigrating at all. "Why do people hate the Japanese?" the paper plaintively asked in one 1926 issue. The Rafu declared its "100%" allegiance to America after Japan's 1941 Pearl Harbor attack even after its publisher, H.T. Komai, was one of the first Los Angeles Japanese leaders taken into custody by the FBI.

Japan's jobless rate falls, spending increases

Japan's unemployment rate fell for the second straight month in January and household spending posted solid growth despite a decline in wages -- further signs of recovery in the world's second largest economy. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent from a revised 5.2 percent in December, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Tuesday. The result was better than the 5.1 percent expected by economists in a Kyodo News agency survey. "At least in the labor market, the worst is over," said Hideki Matsumura, senior economist at the Japan Research Institute.

Culture Bridges Korea-Japan Relations

Some foreign news outlets have shed light on the alleged bad blood between Koreans and Japanese based on Japan's annexation of Korea a century ago to interpret why Koreans were so attached to the 19-year-old. They said Koreans were overjoyed because Kim outperformed her Japanese rival, Mao Asada. But evidence supports the claim that the "Yu-na fever" has little to do with Koreans' deep-seated nationalistic antagonism against Japan. Some evidence indicates that Korea-Japan relations are improving.