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AP Photo/Junji Kurokawa

Beauty products offer Japan women rare promotions

It shouldn't be surprising that Panasonic's star manager for developing appliances for women is a woman herself - except that this is Japan, a nation notorious for holding back females in the workplace. The beauty products Shiori Yamada has developed and runs marketing campaigns for have turned out to be hits. And that was the easiest way to silence all the male skeptics at Panasonic Corp. One of Yamada's popular products, the ball-shaped Nano Care humidifier billed as moisturizing your skin, sold 350,000 in a year. She came up with an improved version that works while you sleep, a feature designed to appeal to busy working women.

Greek crisis to hit Japan indirectly

The Greek financial crisis is unlikely to wreak havoc on the Japanese economy, although a strengthening of the yen as a result of the euro's depreciation will inevitably affect exports bound for Europe, according to some economists. But they caution that Japan shouldn't regard the crisis as just something happening on the other side of the planet and the nation must work hard to rebuild its finances, which are actually worse than Greece's.

Japan, China in spat over nuclear arsenal  

Japan has urged China to cut its nuclear arsenal or at least to stop stockpiling more atomic weapons, prompting a strong reaction from Beijing at their foreign ministers' talks, officials said Sunday. The rare demand came when Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada met his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi at regional talks in South Korea Saturday, said Kazuo Kodama, the press secretary of Japan's foreign ministry.

Japan to make high-tech bid for 2022 Cup 

Japan plans to use its technological expertise to win the right to host the 2022 World Cup. Members of Japan's 2022 World Cup Bid Committee gave a preview on Monday of some of the advanced technology they plan to use for hosting football's quadrennial showpiece. Japan officially submitted its bid to host the 2022 World Cup on Friday when organisers took their bid book to FIFA in Zurich.

Prized Japanese social values that withstand 'Westernization' 

Japan is a fascinating and beautiful country, but its culture can be baffling to Westerners. This seems especially true for Americans, with our long history of geographic and cultural isolation from Europe and Asia. In their quick visits to Kyoto's majestic Buddhist temples and Tokyo's ultramodern glitz, our tourists catch a glimpse of the old versus the new. But they get almost no real contact with Japanese people. As for those motivated by commerce, most Americans realize soon enough that guidebooks on "how to do business with the Japanese" are cliched, oversimplified and even misleading.