A man who lost his wife when the Canterbury Television building collapsed in the February 2011 earthquake is adding his voice to calls for the unkempt site to be tidied.

Territorial squabbles over uninhabited islands should not be one of the reasons that people are allowed to kill each other.

South Korean and Japanese flights through China's new maritime air defence zone added to the international defiance of rules Beijing says it has imposed in East China Sea but that neighbours and the US have vowed to ignore.

China's new maritime air defence zone is unenforceable, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said yesterday.

China and Japan appeared to be a step closer to a military confrontation that could drag in the United States.

A volcanic eruption has raised an island in the seas to the far south of Tokyo, the Japanese coast guard and earthquake experts said.

Japan's decision to drastically scale back its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions could hurt efforts to craft a global deal to fight climate change, delegates at UN talks said.

Japan is preparing to send as many as 1,000 troops to the storm-ravaged Philippines, and naval vessels and aircraft in what could be Tokyo's biggest postwar military deployment.

S Korean president Park Geun Hye said this week she is willing to hold a summit with N Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but she rejects any meeting with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe until Japan apologises for wrongdoings during its 35-year occupation of Korea.

A Christchurch couple has returned from a trip to Japan to visit the family of a student they hosted who was killed in the February 2011 earthquake.

Forget all that creaking and groaning of stressed metal as the pressure of millions of tonnes of water comes to bear. That's pure Hollywood. It's actually dead quiet.

A powerful and shallow earthquake has struck off Japan's east coast, triggering a series of small tsunamis and prompting evacuations at the Fukushima nuclear site.

Britain has struck an agreement to build a new nuclear power plant - the first such deal in the European Union since the disaster at Fukushima prompted a major rethink of the energy source's merits.

A typhoon has caused deadly mudslides that buried people and destroyed homes on a Japanese island before sweeping up the Pacific coast.

When Caroline Kennedy appeared at a United States' Senate confirmation hearing, it was no surprise the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations was raised.

Crews were cleaning up wrecked houses and assessing damage in the wake of a powerful typhoon that lashed Japan with torrential rains, leaving at least two people dead.

A New Zealand woman has been barred from a Japanese bathhouse because of her facial ta moko.

A Maori woman has reportedly been refused entry to a public bath in Japan because of her ta moko facial tattoo.

Tokyo has been awarded the 2020 Olympics, capitalising on its reputation as a "safe pair of hands" and defying concerns about the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Japan's Prime Minister says the country's nuclear contamination crisis is "under control" and should not affect Tokyo's bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games.