Posted by ampontan on Monday, December 15, 2008 IT’S DECEMBER, and that’s when spring cleaning gets underway in Japan. Families throughout the country will soon be freezing their fannies off as they clean their houses inside and out. It makes a lot more sense when you realize that one expression in Japanese for New Year’s is shinshun, which is literally “new spring”. New Year’s in Japan is considered a time of renewal, so it’s a spring cleaning in more ways than one. And in Japan, where cleanl

Asian shares fall for 3rd day to lowest since Oct 30 Japan’s Nikkei down 5%; other stock markets tumble Yen eases from prior day rally on profit-taking Oil, metals slide on global demand worries ASIAN shares sank on Thursday to their lowest this month on uncertainty about whether the United States can succeed in its massive banking rescue and a revenue warning from Intel. The Japanese yen retreated against the euro and the US dollar after soaring on Wednesday on a flight-to-quality. Ot

Japan readies funding for IMF as gloom deepens November 13th, 2008 HONG KONG (Reuters) - Japan stood ready to offer more than $100 billion to emerging economies as governments scrambled to come to grips with a fast-moving financial crisis that threatened to tip the world into a deep and long recession. Markets tumbled in Asia, a day after Washington backed away from using a $700 billion bailout fund to cleanse bank balance sheets of bad mortgage debt and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson