Japan

You look fat in that. Of course I'll be late. Your baby reminds me of Gollum's uncle. This is what the 2013 Subaru BRZ might say if it could talk. The all-new, rear-wheel-drive sports car starts at $26,265, and boy is it honest - perhaps more so than any other car on the market today, save for its mechanical twin, the Scion FR-S. The two were jointly developed by Subaru and Scion's parent company, Toyota, with both assembled by Subaru in Japan. The question about the BRZ is, can you handle the honesty?

The Tokyo Skytree , the world's tallest communications tower, opened Tuesday. Twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, it stands 2,080 feet tall (only Dubai's Burj Khalifa is taller at 2,716 feet) with observation decks that offer amazing views of the densely packed Japanese capital. So how much does that view cost? Visitors going to the Tembo Deck at 1,148 feet above the city pay $31.25 for adults and $25 for children 12 to 17 from now until July 10 (and you have to buy tickets in advance and online with a credit card issued in Japan, according to Skytree website )

A tangy, sour, fermented milk drink may not sound like a likely candidate to move from health food stores to mainstream supermarkets, but that's exactly what kefir has done. The beverage is steadily gaining fans convinced of the health benefits -- proponents tout its purported ability to help cure cancer, reduce high cholesterol and treat high blood pressure -- yet the scientific studies to support the claims are still few. Kefir's closest cousin is yogurt, also made by fermenting milk with bacteria.

The battleship Iowa, a storied vessel that languished for years in the U.S. Navy's mothball fleet, is about to start its final journey, from San Francisco to its permanent home as a museum in the Port of Los Angeles. Next Sunday, four tugboats will guide the Iowa, among the biggest U.S. battleships ever built, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of the San Francisco Bay. One of them, the 7,200-horsepower Warrior, will chug down the coast with the massive ship in tow, taking three or four days to reach Southern California.

The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row. That could settle a long-standing argument among historians. Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery.

These are the dusky days of old age that kamikaze pilots like Shigeyoshi Hamazono were not supposed to see. Three times during the final months of World War II, Japanese officers sent Hamazono off to die, ordering him to crash-dive a single-engine plane stuffed with bombs into an American warship. Bad weather aborted the first mission, an oil leak the second. On his final attempt in April 1945, he encountered three American pilots over the sea off Okinawa.

With frosty mugs of Butterbeer raised in a toast, Universal Studios Hollywood officials announced plans Tuesday to bring the wildly popular Wizarding World of Harry Potter to the California theme park. Details were limited but officials did say the California park would see a Hogwarts Castle and visitors would ride Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, the marquee attraction at the Florida park. Wizarding World will be built within the existing California theme park, but it was unclear if the new land might be located at least partially on the studio's back lot. > Photos: Top 10 Wizarding World of Harry Potter rides and attractions Wizarding World proved an instant hit when it opened in June 2010 at Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure theme park.

Using a machine that looks like a giant trash compactor, a company in Wilmington is doing its bit to make a dent in the foreign trade deficit. Orient Hay Cube Distributors has developed a machine that it considers state of the art in the rather specialized business of putting hay into shipping crates for transport to the Far East.

IT'S the tuft of hair on the chin, the relief of a goatee on the smooth aluminum surface of the face, that gives the character's identity away. Otherwise, the 17-foot-high statue of a big-eyed "Oval Buddha" could be just another of Takashi Murakami's cute creations: a wandering space alien, perhaps, or a member of a tribe of ghosts. The character sits like Humpty Dumpty on the lip of a flower vase, his oversized head far too big for his tiny torso. He has a potbelly. His spine sags.

The images of destruction coming from Japan have caused those who dwell on America's West Coast to wonder: Could a devastating tsunami hit here? The answer is a resounding yes. Our coast is under threat from two types of tsunamis. One type is caused by earthquakes that happen far away. In the last half-century, the West Coast has experienced tsunamis originating in Chile, Alaska and the Kuril Islands in Russia, as well as last week's ocean surge from Japan. These tsunamis generated far away will continue to strike the West Coast, given the multiple sources for earthquakes around the Pacific Rim. But they allow for more warning.

Having cast a spell in Orlando and planted his flag in Los Angeles, Harry Potter is now taking his theme park magic across the Pacific. Universal Studios Japan on Thursday will unveil plans to build the first international version of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the blockbuster attraction that has drawn millions of fans to Universal's Orlando resort and is expected to do the same at a planned Hollywood location. The Osaka destination, which will begin construction in the next few weeks with a planned opening in late 2014, is the latest in a series of expansions underway at major parks around the world that has followed an uptick in attendance, particularly in Asia.

BEIJING — The second annual Beijing International Film Festival opens Monday amid a film industry boom in China. Box-office revenue totaled more than $2 billion for the first time in 2011. And in the quarter just ended China overtook Japan to become the largest foreign market for American films, thanks in part to continued movie theater expansion. The number of screens doubled in five years to 10,700 at the end of last year. That number is expected to rise to 13,000 by the end of 2012, according to the Motion Picture Assn.

The prospect of power shortages in Japan this summer, of stifling city apartments and manufacturing slowdowns, has divided a country still reeling from the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl over whether to restart some of its idled reactors. The government contends that the country can't afford not to resume nuclear energy production. The last operating nuclear reactor in Japan, on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, will be taken off line May 5 for stress tests and safety improvements.

Facebook's chief executive is now serving in another capacity: its official ambassador. Mark Zuckerberg, who was most recently spotted in China, is visiting Japan and, with camera flashes blazing, had a brief meeting with a star-struck Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. Zuckerberg told Noda that the tsunami that struck the nation inspired him to find ways that the social network can help people in natural disasters. Last month , Facebook rolled out a "Disaster Message Board" in Japan to help people find each other during emergencies.

The Oakland Athletics will be the home team, but the Seattle Mariners and outfielder Ichiro Suzuki will be the crowd favorites as Major League Baseball opens its 2012 season Wednesday with a game that starts at 3 a.m. PDT. Seattle is the only MLB team with a Japanese owner, retired Nintendo Chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi, who has had a majority stake in the Mariners since 1992 yet has never seen his team play in person — a streak that will be extended...

High-tech toilets, bento box animal characters and sushi-go-round carousels are among the top 10 things that some say make Japan hip. Sumo wrestlers, rickshaw rides and iced coffee? Not so much. That's the latest results of the highly unscientific "Is Japan Cool?" online poll, posted by  All Nippon Airways, in which more than 3,700  people so far ranked the toilets at No. 2. "Ordinary features include warm water washer, automatic up/down lavatory seating, seat warmer and deodorizer," the poll description reads.

Fourth-generation farmer Greg Massa was in the middle of the rice harvest and he was dirty, angry and depressed. The price of the gasoline that powers his water pumps and rice harvester has never been more expensive. A late planting season, hot summer and rising expenses had ensured a less-than-stellar harvest, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasting a 13% drop compared with last year.

Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret. "We argue a lot about the food," she says, wrinkling her nose. "To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy." There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature. Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers.

Japan has one. So do Mexico, Taiwan, Turkey and Romania. But California has struggled to develop and deploy an earthquake warning system that would give cities seconds of crucial time to prepare for the impact of a massive earthquake. California is spending only a fraction of what Japan and Mexico have devoted, and scientists said the progress is so slow that they cannot say when the state might complete its own system. Until recently, researchers were spending only about $400,000 a year developing the technology.

"You are about to see something strange and very memorable," architect Yoshihiro Horii told me as we were driving near the waterfront in Ishinomaki, a city of 160,000 people in northeastern Japan that was heavily damaged by the earthquake and tsunami last March 11. As his wife, a fellow architect named Shoko Fukuya, steered the car over the crest of a hill, we caught a glimpse of what he was talking about: a giant red metal cylinder, 35 feet high...