The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has begun offering free hotel rooms over the New Year to people hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
Tokyo officials are working with local welfare offices and support groups to allow people who lost their homes to stay at business hotels free of charge from Monday until January 19.
The total number of coronavirus infections in Japan has topped 200,000.
So far on Monday, 41 new cases have been reported across the country, pushing up the total to 200,001.
The Japanese government has approved a record draft budget worth more than 106 trillion yen, or about 1 trillion dollars, for the next fiscal year.
The plan was approved at a cabinet meeting on Monday.
Major Japanese trading firms are making inroads into the growing market for online video streaming.
Mitsui & Company is taking a 51-percent stake in the Japanese affiliate of Tastemade, a US video network that offers food- and travel-related programming to an online audience.
A man in the Japanese city of Hiroshima waiting to be hospitalized for coronavirus infection experienced a rapid deterioration of his condition at home and died there.
Hiroshima officials held a news conference on Sunday to explain what happened. They said the man in his 60s tested positive for the coronavirus on December 13 after having been determined to have had close contact with another virus-carrier.
Japanese authorities had reported 2,496 new cases of the coronavirus as of 8 p.m. on Sunday.
They reported 36 deaths, including six in Osaka, five each in Hokkaido and Aichi, and four in Nara.
A Japanese medical institution says an increasing number of children had to receive liver transplants from living donors this year after their condition worsened. It attributes the delay in the operations to the coronavirus outbreak.
A team led by Yamada Masaki at the National Center for Child Health and Development in Tokyo conducted a survey of 15 children who received living-donor liver transplants between May and October.
Companies are utilizing vein authentication to allow consumers to make payments without physical contact.
Hitachi in October launched a dedicated device that reads the pattern of veins in people's fingers.
Dozens of skiers trapped for 11 hours in a cottage on a ski slope in northern Japan have been freed.
The road leading to Inakawa ski resort in the city of Yuzawa in Akita Prefecture was blocked by a fallen power pole and toppled trees.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government on Sunday reported 556 new coronavirus cases in the capital.
That's the highest number announced on a Sunday. The daily tally has now topped 500 for five straight days.
Hospital beds in Japan are rapidly filling up as the number of cases of the coronavirus infection continue to rise.
A health ministry report shows as of Tuesday, seven prefectures were at Stage 4, the most critical of the government's four-tier alert system. Two more prefectures, Aichi and Mie, have been added to the five that were already at that stage previous week.
Sunday marks 50 years since unrest which occurred after a car driven by US military personnel hit a local resident near a US base in Okinawa.
The unrest took place on December 20, 1970, two years before reversion of the southern prefecture from the United States to Japan.
Japanese authorities reported 2,991 new coronavirus cases as of 11:30 p.m. on Saturday.
Thirty-eight people died, including 10 in Hokkaido, nine in Osaka, five in Tokyo, two each in Chiba, Iwate and Kanagawa, and one each in Nara, Miyazaki, Gifu, Ehime, Aichi, Tochigi, Gunma and Shizuoka.
An event has been held to promote the rice harvest in a coastal area of the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture. This year's harvest was the first since the area was hit by the 2011 tsunami and the nearby nuclear accident.
An evacuation order for the town's coastal area was lifted 3 years ago, but the restoration of farm land took longer.