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Japan’s Fast Retailing said Wednesday that it will raise the starting monthly salary for new employees by 10% to ¥330,000 from March 2025, taking their annual pay to slightly over ¥5 million. The operator of the Uniqlo casual clothing stores said that it wants to attract talented university graduates in a bid to reinforce the company’s global competitiveness and growth potential. For store managers in their first or second year at Fast Retailing, the monthly salary is set to increase to ¥410,000 from the current ¥390,000. Their annual pay will rise about 5% to ¥7.3 million. Fast Retailing will also introduce a new remuneration system for its domestic personnel, lifting salary table figures for full-time headquarters and sales employees by up to 11% depending on the results of assessments of their skills and ambitions. Employees selected or promoted to key positions would enjoy a rise of up to 54%. Fast Retailing had revised the remuneration system for its employees in Japan in the year to Aug. 31, 2023, boosting pay by 4 to 40% depending on the results of evaluations. Chairman and President Tadashi Yanai said the company will continue reassessing remuneration and other aspects of the organizational structure to contribute to “a virtuous cycle of growth and salary increases.” Source link

A potential foreign acquisition of Japanese retail giant Seven & I would be “heavily related” to national security, Japan’s economy minister Ryosei Akazawa said on Wednesday. His public comment is the first by a senior Japanese official over security issues raised by a $47 billion buyout offer by Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard. Seven & I was classified as “core” to Japan’s national security in September, raising questions as to whether it was a defensive move. The finance ministry said at the time that the classification would not create hurdles to a potential buyout. Source link

Japanese cybersecurity authorities raised an alarm Wednesday over a China-linked hacker group called MirrorFace, saying it has struck 210 targets in Japan since 2019. Analyses of the targets and methods and malware used by the hackers suggested that the attacks were an organized activity with a suspected link to the Chinese government to steal information on national security and cutting-edge technologies from Japan, the National Police Agency and the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity said. According to the authorities, MirrorFace sent emails attached with malware to 173 targets including the Foreign and Defense Ministries, think tanks and politicians between December 2019 and July 2023, as well as since June last year. In many cases, senders pretended to be experts or former senior officials from the recipients’ organizations. Many emails had titles referring to contemporary international affairs, including phrases such as “Japan-U.S. alliance” and “Taiwan Strait,” or saying they were invitations to conferences or membership lists. MirrorFace was also confirmed to have infiltrated the networks of 37 entities mainly in the semiconductor and information-communications sectors between February and October 2023. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, was also among the victims, people familiar with the matter said. Internal information may have been exposed in these attacks, which took advantage of vulnerabilities in virtual private network equipment, experts said. Source link

The Fair Trade Commission issued administrative guidance to Japan Post last year for failing to adequately respond to a request from its parcel delivery service subcontractor to pass on higher costs, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday. Japan Post was asked by a subcontractor entrusted with Yu-Pack parcel deliveries to raise the commission fees it paid, in light of rising costs. The company, however, left the subcontracting fees unchanged without discussion, according to the people. The FTC issued the administrative guidance to Japan Post in June last year, judging that Japan Post’s response could be perceived under the subcontract law as driving down prices. It was already known that the FTC also issued an administrative guidance in the same month to Japan Post for collecting penalty fees for failed deliveries and complaints about cigarette smell from subcontractors without sufficient explanation, in violation of the same law. Source link

NEW DELHI – After India achieved world-beating economic growth last year, its policymakers are scrambling to head off a sharp slowdown as worsening global conditions and domestic confidence wipe out a recent stock market rally. On Tuesday, Asia’s third-largest economy forecast an annual growth of 6.4% for its fiscal year ending March, the slowest in four years and below the government’s initial projections, weighed by weaker investment and manufacturing. The downgrade follows disappointing economic indicators and a slowdown in corporate earnings in the second half of 2024, which have forced investors to rethink the country’s earlier outperformance and cast doubts over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious economic targets. Source link

Major TV networks have distanced themselves from one of Japan’s biggest 1990s boy band stars after media reports said he paid a woman a large settlement related to alleged sexual misconduct. The reports, which emerged last month, said that Masahiro Nakai, a 52-year-old former member of the hugely popular group SMAP, had paid a woman a lump sum of ¥90 million ($570,000). That was to settle what most Japanese media outlets have cautiously described as “sexual trouble” concerning an encounter that took place in 2023. Source link

Tokyo police announced Wednesday that they have rearrested three individuals, including the CEO of a painting company, on suspicion of assaulting a former colleague five months before his death in an alleged staged suicide. Authorities believe the victim, 56-year-old Osamu Takano, was repeatedly abused by the suspects over many years, which left him physically and mentally incapable of resisting when he was allegedly coerced into entering a railway crossing in December 2023, where he was struck by a train. Police investigating the events leading to his death uncovered this new evidence of abuse. Source link

A research team at Osaka University found that 87% of patients who suffered kidney function impairments after using Kobayashi Pharmaceutical’s beni kōji red yeast rice supplement continued to experience reduced kidney function, even after stopping their intake. The findings, released Tuesday, were based on a survey of 192 patients reported by physicians affiliated with the Japanese Society of Nephrology. Researchers stressed the importance of long-term follow-up for affected patients. The study, led by Yoshitaka Isaka, a professor at Osaka University’s graduate school of internal medicine, analyzed data from patients who reported health issues between late March and late April 2024. The research team tracked the progress of 114 of these patients until early June of the same year. While many patients showed improvement in Fanconi syndrome — a condition where kidney tubules fail to reabsorb essential nutrients such as potassium and phosphorus — 87% still had kidney function indicators below standard levels. This was despite two months having passed since the company urged consumers to stop taking the supplement. The team suggested the possibility of nephron reduction, the structures in kidneys responsible for filtering waste in the blood and producing urine. Among 102 patients who underwent kidney biopsies, 50% exhibited tubulointerstitial nephritis (inflammation), while 32% showed evidence of tubular necrosis. The use of immunosuppressive steroid drugs, typically effective in kidney disease treatment, showed no benefits, leading researchers to propose that the kidney damage may stem from mechanisms unrelated to immune abnormalities. “There were many patients whose kidney function remained impaired,” Isaka stated. “Further investigation will be necessary going forward.” Translated by The Japan Times Source link

Geneva – An awkward question remains five years after Covid-19 began its deadly rampage: is the world ready to handle the next pandemic? The World Health Organization, which was at the heart of the pandemic response, has been galvanizing efforts to determine where the next threat might come from and to ensure the planet is ready to face it. But while the U.N. health agency considers the world more prepared than it was when Covid hit, it warns we are not nearly ready enough. Source link

The Denver Nuggets’ 2023-24 season ended in the Western Conference semifinals, with a seven-game series loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Nikola Jokic, the Nuggets’ star center, shot just 2 for 14 from 3-point range in the final two games, both Denver losses. Jokic didn’t shoot the ball well enough. He knew it, and privately, it ate at him. So during the offseason, Jokic went to his player development coach, Nuggets assistant Ogi Stojakovic, and told him that almost every shot felt different to him. Jokic is a perfectionist, a creature of routine. He believed that something was obviously wrong with his shooting mechanics, and he wanted to fix it. Source link