News stories by Suvendrini Kakuchi, page 10

It has been a long and exhausting wait for anti-death penalty campaigners like Akiko Takada, but there are few signs that capital punishment will be taken off Japan’s law books any time soon.

Since their first child was born 16 years ago, Hiroyuki Ozaki has taken care of the household, relinquishing his traditional role as the main breadwinner while his wife held on to her career in the travel industry.

Fifty-one year old Miharu juggles two part-time jobs at a law firm and at a design company, but is barely able to make ends meet in one of the world’s richest economies.

When architect Hikari Kurihara built his quaint house five years ago, he hoped to spread a new message of conservation — by revisiting the past.

Wahyudin dreams of becoming a full-fledged caregiver, if not a certified nurse, in Japan. But the Indonesian worker must first pass the required Japanese-language national certification examination, which is far from easy.

With her knees shaking and her heart thudding, Toshiko Hamamako rose to address the audience. But it was more than stage fright.

Common business wisdom would have it that rising wages are bad news for foreign investors, but analysts here say that workers’ clamour for higher pay in Japanese factories in China will not send them packing from that country anytime soon.

The Japanese government may have revised the country’s laws in response to complaints that its system of hiring foreign trainees at lower wages is exploitative, but calls remain for the latter to be scrapped altogether.

Worries about its political survival will hound Japan’s ruling party after its setback in the recent Upper House polls, leaving it little room to pursue policies that the country’s neighbours had been looking forward to when the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in 2009.

Masako Suzuki, 50, has been fighting tooth and nail for the last six years just to gain equal custody of her son, who lives with her estranged husband.