Japan

The king and queen of reassuring early '70s folk-rock, James Taylor and Carole King, will team up once again for a "Troubadour Reunion" tour that will open March 27 in Melbourne, Australia, and reach Los Angeles in a May 14 stop at the Hollywood Bowl. The veteran singer-songwriters appeared together for the first time in decades at a 2007 show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood where they had made their debut in 1969. They will be backed by several of the musicians who played with them live and on record the first time around, including guitarist Danny Kortchmar, bassist Lee Sklar and drummer Russ Kunkel.

Japan's economy grew a faster-than-expected 1.7% in the three months to December as robust growth in the United States and China boosted exports and spurred investment. Defying worries about a strong yen, gross domestic product in October to December expanded an annualized 7%, government data showed. That beat forecasts for quarterly growth of 1.1% and annualized growth of 4.6%. The figures mark the longest period of expansion in Japan since a nine-quarter run of growth that ended in early 1997.

A 1996 Taurus, Ford Motor Co.'s first car designed specially for the Japanese market, rolled out at dealerships Tuesday with a lower price and a key new feature: the steering wheel on the right-hand side. For years, Japan's government has depicted U.S. auto makers as whining about a closed market while not being serious about selling cars in Japan because they tried to market American-style vehicles with steering wheels on the left.

In the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay, scientists have discovered the first known foreign marine microbe to immigrate into U.S. coastal waters. Researchers from UC Berkeley and the U.S. Geological Survey reported today at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver that a single-celled organism is now living in the bay. Called Trochammina hadai, the amoeba-like creatures normally live in the shallow estuaries and bays of Japan.

Outside, the warm, damp breath of a late summer typhoon still hangs heavy in the air, but inside the Ski Dome, the temperature is an immutable 23 degrees. It is not yet 10 a.m. on an ordinary Friday, but the parking lot is already full of shiny new mini-jeeps, and several hundred young people carefully dressed in up-to-the-minute, baggy, drab clothing are lined up waiting to get in. The attraction: snowboarding, Japan's latest sports craze.

Could this be the latest fashion trend to hit Japan? Los Angeles County supervisors agreed Tuesday to license the manufacture, sale and distribution of Los Angeles County coroner's memorabilia in Japan for the next five years. So on the other side of the Pacific, Japanese consumers will be able to buy personalized toe-tag key chains, like those used in the morgue, beach towels with chalk outlines of murder victims, and mugs, tote bags and T-shirts with the coroner's logo.

A private fund that Japan inaugurated with much fanfare earlier this year to pay Korean and other women forced into prostitution for the Imperial Army in World War II has collected such meager contributions that the effort threatens to backfire and become a national embarrassment. The Japanese government, after rejecting appeals for public compensation, helped set up the "Asian Peace and Friendship Fund for Women" on Aug. 15 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war's end.

The presidents of South Korea and China on Tuesday jointly lambasted Japan for whitewashing its wartime past, in the strongest expression of common political ground during their historic summit here. Skirting the delicate issue of North Korea, the two leaders devoted the bulk of a news conference and much of a summit meeting to denouncing Japan.