Word: japanned
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...debit cards) into electronic accounts, or e-wallets, where hard cash is converted into digital currency for online purchases. There are already several companies providing micropayment services to gaming websites; Santa Clara, Calif. - based PlaySpan offers its service in 80 countries. Micropayments are also migrating to mobile phones. In Japan, cell phones are regularly used to pay parking-meter and vending-machine charges, while Apple's iPhone 3.0 operating system includes a purchasing platform that will allow developers of mobile-phone games to sell virtual goods via handsets, with billing through iTunes. That's an industry-changing development, says Juniper...
...decades since, the focus of a dynastic cult of personality like no other. (Dead for 15 years, Kim Il Sung is still North Korea's "President for life.") Kim Jong Il has three sons from two wives. The eldest embarrassed his father in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport. His father thinks the middle son, Kim Jong Chul, is "too feminine" for the job, according to Fujimoto. Hence the mantle of leadership will apparently someday be handed to Kim Jong Un. "A systematic succession plan is now under way, and has been since early this...
...government views the case as wholly separate from the other issues now dividing Pyongyang and Washington. But Pyongyang almost certainly does not. For a regime that acts more like a Mafia family than a government, kidnapping has been a tactic North Korea has used for decades. Relations between Japan and North Korea are inflamed precisely because of revelations that for years the North kidnapped Japanese and then used them to train North Korean spies in Japanese language, culture and history. At a moment when Washington is pledging to get tough, Pyongyang "will absolutely view the two young journalists as bargaining...
They come on sunny days, when the sky is bright and clear above the Tojinbo cliffs along the coast of the Sea of Japan. Yukio Shige says they don't look at the view. "They don't carry a camera or souvenir gifts," he says. "They don't have anything. They hang their heads and stare at the ground...
...basalt cliffs in Fukui prefecture, north of Kyoto on the western coast of Japan, are a well-known site for suicide in a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world; at 23.8 per 100,000, Japan's rate is significantly higher than that of the U.S., for example, where the rate is 11 per 100,000. One in 5 Japanese men and women has seriously considered taking his or her life, according to a recent government survey; each year over the past decade, more than 30,000 people have killed themselves. And as the economic downturn...