Japanese scientists have found a special bacteria, Ideonella sakainesis, that likes to eat polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET.

Once the 2011 tsunami rolled back into the ocean, it swept marine life as far away as California.

Microsoft Japan gives staff Fridays off — and it pays off for both employees and the company's bottom line.

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Japanese knotweed can be the bane of a great many homeowners, the invasive "ornamental" plant is quite possibly the most hated plant due to its rhizomes. It grows around 7 feet high and the roots, which are the real problem, can go twice as deep.

Let's become a Tokyo-born hero.

Join the world's largest treasure hunting game and discover 27,000 hidden geocaches in Japan

The guest of honor at the event was Nobuki Sugihara, the son of the noted Righteous Among the Nations. The event was a central feature of the Limmud FSU annual festival in Belarus, attended by some 600 young Jewish participants.

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.

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 .

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?

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.

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

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

The Western-style wedding dress worn by a Japanese war bride in 1956 is on display at the National Museum as part of a wider exhibit about immigration.

Three quarters of a century after hundreds of Japanese prisoners of war escaped from a detention camp in Cowra, New South Wales, the town has forged a friendship with Japan centred on peace and respect.

The Album Will Be Released On 11th May Via Cherry Red Records Worldwide Excluding Japan Where The Album Is Available Via King Records.

なかなかアートなメッセージ
読めますか？ pic.twitter.com/swywHlwd3N

— 和田 賢治 @ TSUBAKI LAB.代表：木を科学していく (@simplife_plus) May 5, 2020

What seems to be just a page full of bubbles turns out to be a heartwarming message when viewed from a distance. This newspaper from Gifu Shimbun was issued on May 6.

Utilizing a form of bubbly negative space to render the text, the newspaper spelled out a message to its readers about social distancing. The magic is you have to maintain an appropriate social distance to read the letters.

The message reads, 離れていても　心はひとつ, which means even though we’re apart, our hearts are one.

Thanks, Japan!

(Image Credit: @simplife_plus/ Twitter)

A crispy grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with Japanese style dry curry and plenty of melted cheese! April is National Grilled Cheese Month and I just had to share a grilled cheese recipe with you! Karepan (or kare pan or curry bread) is a Japanese food where dough is filled with curry and deep fried until...

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The post Karepan (Japanese Curry Grilled Cheese) appeared first on Closet Cooking.

There’s a very definite Tokyo-area bias in this survey from goo Ranking into which factory tours people would want to go on; the pictured food sample factory is not one of them, though. The only factory tours I’ve been on in Japan were three times to the Yamazaki distillery tour and tasting and once to […]

No words, just a map: OK, a few words; goo Ranking looked at what theme restaurants or bars Japanese might want to visit. Some of these restaurants are also popular with tourists and foreign residents, so perhaps you can find a new favourite in the list? Also note that some of the places have other […]

I’m back, and with some free time let’s try a translation I started last year; brands that the Japanese were surprised to learn were actually Japan-born. Samantha Thavasa television advertisements have an extremely American feel with supermodels frolicing around New York in fancy frocks, so I too was surprised to find they were actually Japanese. […]

This survey is ancient in terms of the progression of COVID-19, but there’s still interesting figures in this survey from @nifty conducted at the end of March into COVID-19. This survey was conducted before the Olympics were postponed and the state of emergency declared. So far I’d put myself in the not really worried category; […]

The Flat racing calendar in the northern hemisphere remains mired in uncertainty, but in one jurisdiction the first Classics of the season have been staged as the coronavirus pandemic rages.

Many Times readers have taken issue with two letters in this week's Travel section, which criticized a Nov. 27 article about National Park sites that address issues of race and ethnicity in America's history.

Irene Hirano Inouye, a prodigious fundraiser who led the nation's premier Japanese American museum in Los Angeles and built bridges across cultures and countries, has died.

Japanese researchers at Keio University have unveiled a robotic tail that has been designed to be worn by elderly people who struggle to maintain their balance.

Vancouver resident Hugo Huynh says he's never seen the man who got out of a minivan outside his home early Monday morning and uprooted the young tree.

Research Event

Event participants

Kiichi Fujiwara, Professor of International Politics, Graduate School for Law and Politics, Tokyo University
Yuichi Hosoya, Professor of International Politics, Faculty of Law, Keio University
Akiko Yamanaka, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge; Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan (2005-2006)
Chair: John Swenson-Wright, Senior Consulting Fellow, Asia Programme, Chatham House 

OBJECTIVE

To assess the efficacy and safety of a 1:1 fixed-ratio combination of insulin glargine and lixisenatide (iGlarLixi) versus lixisenatide (Lixi) in insulin-naive Japanese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) inadequately controlled on oral antidiabetic drugs (OADs).

Referred to as a Japanese 'pizza', okonomiyaki is probably best described as a cabbage fritter. There are many versions that can include seafood, pork belly, kimchi or cheese, and either served with the sauce described or with Japanese mayonnaise. Delicious snack food, which can also be a meal.

1 bunch of spring onions, finely chopped 250 g minced beef 250 g minced pork 20 g grated ginger 1 egg 2 tsps. roasted sesame oil 1 tbsp. cornflour, plus extra for dusting sunflower oil, for shallow frying 1 tbsp. white sesame seeds salt and ground white pepper For the sweet ginger sauce: 30 g grated ginger 3 tbsps. soy sauce 125 ml dashi stock or 1 tsp instant dashi powder mixed with water 2 tbsps. sugar 3 tbsps. mirin 3 tbsps. rice vinegar 1 tsp cornflour