The yen, which investors typically snap up as a safe haven in times of financial market stress, fell nearly 10% against the dollar this month, as pandemic fears spurred a stampede into the refuge of the world's most powerful currency.

Led by defending champion Inti (JPN), Mozu Ascot and Arctos (JPN), a field of 16 horses has been entered for Sunday's 37th running of the 1-mile, $2 million February Stakes (G1) on dirt at Tokyo Racecourse. The February Stakes is the first automatic qualifier for this year's $6 million Longines Breeders' Cup Classic (G1) to be […]

The post Field Of 16 Set For Japan’s February Stakes, First ‘Win And You’re In’ For Breeders’ Cup Classic appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Breeders' Cup Ltd., in conjunction with the Japan Racing Association, today announced that the US$2.1 million Victoria Mile, a Group 1 race for fillies and mares, 4-years-old and up, to be held May 17 at Tokyo Race Course, will be a new race in the 2020 international Breeders' Cup Challenge Series. The Breeders' Cup Challenge […]

The post Japan’s Victoria Mile Named Breeders’ Cup Challenge Race appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Ginza. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Minamisoma, Japan 2014 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Ginza. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Seagate. Rikuzentakata, Japan 2019 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Ikebukuro. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Minamisoma, Japan 2014 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Prada Omotesando building by Herzog and De Meuron

Tower by Jun Mitsui

My favorite home product company, many of their products are designed by Naoto Fukasawa

Omotesando Koffee, a one man espresso bar hidden in a residential area

It was installed in the first floor of an eighty year old traditional house set to be demolished

The only seating in a small front garden

Neural machine translation (NMT) needs large parallel corpora for state-of-the-art translation quality. Low-resource NMT is typically addressed by transfer learning which leverages large monolingual or parallel corpora for pre-training. Monolingual pre-training approaches such as MASS (MAsked Sequence to Sequence) are extremely effective in boosting NMT quality for languages with small parallel corpora. However, they do not account for linguistic information obtained using syntactic analyzers which is known to be invaluable for several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. To this end, we propose JASS, Japanese-specific Sequence to Sequence, as a novel pre-training alternative to MASS for NMT involving Japanese as the source or target language. JASS is joint BMASS (Bunsetsu MASS) and BRSS (Bunsetsu Reordering Sequence to Sequence) pre-training which focuses on Japanese linguistic units called bunsetsus. In our experiments on ASPEC Japanese--English and News Commentary Japanese--Russian translation we show that JASS can give results that are competitive with if not better than those given by MASS. Furthermore, we show for the first time that joint MASS and JASS pre-training gives results that significantly surpass the individual methods indicating their complementary nature. We will release our code, pre-trained models and bunsetsu annotated data as resources for researchers to use in their own NLP tasks.

Sir Ben Ainslie has taken a major step towards winning the America's Cup.

Host Joseph Pace and guests explore the history of discrimination against Japanese Americans and immigrants in the first half of the 20th century. What parallels can be drawn between their experiences and today’s debate over immigration and national security?

This is Sample Size, our weekly new music feature with KOSU's Ryan LaCroix and LOOKatOKC music critic Matt Carney. Today, Matt plays new music from Suzi Analogue and Liam Betson , and tells us about the lengths audiophiles will go to get pure sound . Follow Matt & Ryan on Twitter at @mdotcarney and @KOSUryan .

This is Sample Size, our weekly new music feature with KOSU's Ryan LaCroix and LOOKatOKC music critic Matt Carney. Today, Matt plays new music from Terry Allen , Japandroids , and Beyonce + Dixie Chicks . Follow Matt & Ryan on Twitter at @mdotcarney & @KOSUryan . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc4s6Q6XGVs

This is Sample Size, our weekly new music feature with KOSU's Ryan LaCroix and LOOKatOKC music critic Matt Carney. Today, Matt plays new music from Japandroids , Spoon , and Thundercat . Follow Matt & Ryan on Twitter at @mdotcarney & @KOSUryan .

MeFites in Japan, unite! (While, of course, maintaining appropriate distance) This upcoming Sunday (April 19) at 19:00 we'll be meeting on Zoom to chat and conviviate (that's probably not a real word). You're probably at home, you're probably going stir crazy, you probably want to meet new people or see familiar faces again, so you should join us! If you want to attend, say the word and we'll send you the Zoom meeting invite link via MeMail.

Sun April 19 at 8:00 PM,

Hey all. I don't know if you noticed this, but we're in uncharted territory here. If you look at the sidebar, it has a list of "most active cities" for meetups, and we're essentially in second place (a couple cities have had four, sure), and if we have another meetup this Sunday, boom, we'll be one of the most active cities/amorphous regional groupings in all of Metafilterland! Can't you just feel those competitive juices flowing, urging you on to meet once again on Sunday night at 8 for some light chat, witty observations, and hilarious jokes? Edit: changed time to 8, longer explanation in the comments

I can set up the zoom thing again, and will mail invites out to anyone in the going or maybe fields. We managed about seven people last week, which was nice. I figure if we're going to do these things regularly, it might be nice to have a theme of some sort, something to get things going, and honestly, all I've got is jokes. Like, terrible jokes. Not offensive, just really, painfully unfunny jokes, the best kind! Please think up a terrible joke to share when we meet on Sunday, and from there, we can just sort of go wherever it takes us. I'd like to extend the invitation to Mefites around the world, as well, just on the off chance they're awake and up for meeting at 8pm Japan time on Sunday, but I'm not really sure how. I imagine posting in MeTa would get us more people than we could probably handle, and there's also a part of me that thinks 6-8 people is just about the upper limit for Zoom anyway. What do you folks think?

Sun April 26 at 8:00 PM,

It's easy to lose track, but Golden Week is upon us! Let's celebrate Golden Week's Greenery Day (Monday, May 4) together!. We can all reminisce about Greenery Day events through the ages, exchange Greenery Day trivia (surprisingly, Greenery Day has nothing to do with the American rock band called Green Day), and discuss how Greenery Day has affected our lives. Do you remember where you were the year that "GD" was moved from April 29 to May 4?

As usual we will be on Zoom, so download the Zoom client in advance for an optimal experience, and sign up here to receive an invitation to the event. We're scheduled for 8-10pm (roughly), Monday May 4. The following day is also a government holiday. Suggestions for non Greenery Day-related topics of discussion are also welcome. And does anyone want to play Trivial Pursuit?

Mon May 4 at 8:00 PM, Zoom Zoom Zoom

Excitement! Adventure! Zoom! Witty Banter!* Mefites beamed directly to your home! Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! (Monster truck voice intensifies) *wittiness of banter not guaranteed, offer void in Taito-ku, Saitama, and some parts of Aichi, consult your doctor if banter causes itchiness or swelling

We had a nice crowd on Monday, hopefully we can have a decent one this week, too. I'll send out the invites Sunday morning, hope to see you all there.

Looking for commercial hit songs for a host of pop artists in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan etc. We work closely with Universal Music in Hong Kong, giving us direct access to major artists in South East Asia and Japan searching for tracks for their next and current projects.

We are looking for commercial radio tracks which have great beats, memorable hook lines and current styles. Uptempo K-Pop, ballads, R&B/Pop, Rock, Soul and MOR suitable for male, female and boy and girl-bands.

Lyrics may be translated depending on the artist so send in all language demos or masters.

We are looking forward to hearing some great music.

- Dean Hart / Afrikan Cowboy Publishing

Deal Type: Song Placement
Decision Maker: Selected tracks will be pitched for final decision
Deal Structure: Non-Exclusive
Compensation: $1,000+ based on final placement
Song Quality: Rough Demos, Fully mastered, Broadcast ready

Years ago, when Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one) aired, someone released an mp3 of the seiyuu/voice actor for Roy Mustang either counting sheep or just plain counting in Japanese, probably from 1 to 100 or similar. It was extremely soothing. I have since lost my copy, and haven't had any luck finding it on the internet--does anyone know where to find this audio file?

In the mountains of rural Japan, “murder hornets” are known for more than their aggression and excruciating sting. They are seen as a pleasant snack and an invigorating ingredient in drinks.

In the mountains of rural Japan, “murder hornets” are known for more than their aggression and excruciating sting. They are seen as a pleasant snack and an invigorating ingredient in drinks.

In the mountains of rural Japan, “murder hornets” are known for more than their aggression and excruciating sting. They are seen as a pleasant snack and an invigorating ingredient in drinks.

The Japanese stock market is rising on Friday following the overnight gains on Wall Street on upbeat corporate earnings results and continued optimism about easing COVID-19 restrictions. Investors shrugged off data that showed Japan's services sector continued to contract in April.

The Japanese stock market, which resumed trading on Thursday after a three-day holiday, is modestly lower following the lackluster cues overnight from Wall Street after a report showed that U.S. private sector employment nosedived in the month of April. The safe-haven yen also strengthened, dragging exporters' stocks lower.

The services sector in Japan continued to contract in April, and at a much more severe rate, the latest survey from Jibun Bank revealed on Friday with a record-low services PMI score of 21.5.

Japan will on Friday see March data for average household spending, highlighting a modest day for Asia-Pacific economic activity. Spending is predicted to sink 6.7 percent on year after easing 0.3 percent in February.

The average of household spending in Japan was down 6.0 percent on year in March, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said on Friday - coming in at 292,214 yen.

Fluently stylish and idiomatic, these performers live and breathe Bach's music.

Sweden's virus experiment: death sentence, or a way forward?

WA Police are forced to apologise after saying Craig Peacock, who double-dipped on his taxpayer-funded allowance to enrich himself and benefit friends including two MPs, would not face criminal charges.

A team of WA Police officers will be deployed to Japan as part of a revived investigation into former trade commissioner Craig Peacock, accused of misusing his position to pocket $540,000 in taxpayer funds.

An obscure character from traditional Japanese folklore has become an unlikely unifier in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Returning to a country she adores, Kumi Taguchi wanted to find her family to deliver news her dad had died.

Japanese Caulfield Cup winner Mer De Glace is the new favourite for Tuesday's Melbourne Cup after the barrier draw is completed at Flemington.

When Jean-Luc Devere's elderly mum ran over his beloved motorbike, he thought it was time to reveal his love of the controversial Japanese subculture, Bosozoku. But he is reluctant to take it too seriously when he travels to Japan this year.

A central Victorian woman is one of only three accredited teachers of a Japanese form of freestyle weaving that is beginning to grow in popularity.

Robert Rankin

Japan reaches the decision to approve the antiviral medication previously used to treat Ebola patients just three days after the drugmaker filed for approval.

Brumbies star Christian Lealiifano will retire from Super Rugby at the end of the season, taking up a lucrative offer to play in Japan.

Australian soldiers in WWII were mystified by the strange footwear of their Japanese enemies, but they also gave them a competitive advantage.

As an experiment, David Elliot-Jones went to Japan to make it big. A documentary crew followed him. This is his story.