Ryuichi Kitano News Today

As part of a survey documenting abuse among Jehovahs Witnesses, 81 percent of second-generation followers report possessing cards showing their refusal to receive blood transfusions.

An exceptionally rare document listing the names and ranks of members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious wartime Unit 731 has turned up in Tokyo.

Oct. 15 marked 20 years since North Korea permitted five Japanese nationals it abducted in the 1970s and ’80s to return to Japan. Since then, no further abductees have been released.

Sept. 17 marked the 20th anniversary of a landmark summit meeting between Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that for a brief moment raised hopes the thorny issue of Pyongyang’s abductions of Japanese nationals would be resolved once and for all.

An expert government panel recommended that female members of the imperial household retain their royal status regardless of marriage but avoided the key question of succession.

A documentary film on the former “home custody” system, under which patients with mental illnesses were lawfully locked up in sheds and other structures at home, has won praise from the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Crown Prince Fumihito and Crown Princess Kiko described the long-delayed marriage of their eldest daughter, Mako, on Oct. 26 as “an unprecedented one for the imperial family.”

Video footage of a Sri Lankan detainee being fed by Nagoya immigration officials despite her vomiting confirms that she was mistreated there before her death, an attorney for her bereaved family said Oct. 5.

The death of a Sri Lankan woman at an immigration detention facility in March has become a rallying cry as the Diet discusses a government-drafted bill to revise the immigration law. The Justice Ministry’s Immigration Services Agency of Japan investigated the incident and released an interim report on April 9, shortly before the start of the Diet’s discussion on the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. But the report apparently omitted the fact that a psychiatrist recommended ...

When an old list of individuals with leprosy who resided in Nagano Prefecture went up for auction in February, local authorities had no legal recourse to prevent the sale.  The ledger-like document, put on sale through the Yafuoku (Yahoo! Auction) site, shows the results of “a survey on leprosy patients and their family lines” in the prefecture during the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Concerns rose that since the patients’ addresses and names were included on the ledger, its public release coul...