More seniors taking to crime in Japan: Poverty, loneliness said to be behind trend, even as overall crime rate in country drops

Clad in black like an ancient-day ronin or samurai, a man scales walls and squeezes into tight spaces in the dark – but in the name of crime. His agility eluded the Osaka police for over eight years, during which more than 29 million yen (approx $255,000 USD) was stolen in some 250 crimes. But

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How an unpaid UK researcher saved the Japanese seaweed industry

The tasty Japanese seaweed nori is ubiquitous today, but that wasn’t always true. Nori was once called “lucky grass” because every year’s harvest was entirely dependent on luck. Then, during World War II, luck ran out. No nori would grow off the coast of Japan, and farmers were distraught. But a major scientific discovery on

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Why Does Japan Have Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green?

In Japan, a game of Red Light, Green Light might be more like Red Light, Blue Light. Because of a linguistic quirk of Japanese, some of the country’s street lights feature “go” signals that are distinctly more blue than green, as Atlas Obscura alerts us, making the country an outlier in international road design. Different languages refer to colors very

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