Japan Police File Murder Charges in Kyoto Animation Arson Case

Sony Interactive Entertainment has reportedly ceased production of most PS4 models in Japan, including the PS4 Pro.This is according to a new Game Watch report, which claims that the only PS4 model that will remain in production is the Jet Black 500GB PS4 Slim.

Mark Schilling Japan CorrespondentAnticipating that the Japanese government may again call for movie theaters to temporarily close in Greater Tokyo due to an upsurge of coronavirus cases, Toho Cinemas and other leading exhibitors are halting sales of advance tickets for cinemas in the areas.

Hayao Miyazaki's nearly two-decade reign atop Japan's all-time box office rankings has come to an end. Runaway anime blockbuster Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train became Japan's biggest box-office hit of all time over the weekend, pushing Miyazaki's beloved classic Spirited Away (2001) into second place.

Refresh for latest…: There was a bit more varied action at the international box office this weekend, including the continued rollout of Warner Bros/DC’s Wonder Woman 1984, a sizable start for China’s Shock Wave 2, the debut of Disney/Pixar’s Soul, The Croods: A New Age nearing $100M global, and a brand new milestone for Japan’s Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train which, according to estimates, has overtaken Spirited Away to become the highest-grossing film ever in the market.

direct to your inbox Researchers have starting giving patients an antibody treatment that could offer immediate protection to people have been exposed to coronavirus to prevent them becoming seriously ill and dying.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefNetflix has announced the greenlight of a second series for Japanese thriller series “Alice in Borderland” barely two weeks after its online debut. The show is a live-action adaptation of a popular manga.The eight-episode sci-fi fantasy is the story of a dissatisfied unemployed man (played by Yamazaki Kento) who follows a mysterious light source and finds that, but for himself and two friends, the population of Tokyo has seemingly disappeared.

Rebecca Davis editorUniversal Music Japan has appointed Rui Suzuki as its Tokyo-based chief financial officer starting on Jan.

Super Nintendo World will be opening at Universal Studios Japan very soon and a new look at the theme park was just unveiled!

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentKaouther Ben Hania’s “The Man Who Sold His Skin” has been sold by Paris-based Bac Films International to further territories. The movie will represent Tunisia in the Oscar race for best international feature film.“The Man Who Sold His Skin” world premiered at Venice, where it won the best actor award for Yahya Mahayni.

It was a frozen Christmas Day in 1949, in the elastic aftermath of World War II, when a dozen U.S. soldiers with the 27th Infantry Regiment "Wolfhounds" accompanied a Red Cross representative to the Holy Family orphanage, tucked into the snowy streets in Osaka, Japan.

It’s not going to end well for Japan’s “Twitter killer.”

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefPolice in Osaka, Japan have begun a legal case against a man who is alleged to have cyberbullied Kimura Hana, the reality TV star who died earlier this year, apparently by suicide.Kimura, a professional wrestler, was one of six cast-members of “Terrace House,” which played locally on Fuji Television and globally on Netflix. The show was subsequently canceled.Police on Thursday referred the case to prosecutors in Osaka.

Japanese prosecutors on Wednesday charged a man with murder for last year’s deadly arson attack on Kyoto Animation, the family-run studio behind a string of internationally beloved anime films and television series. The suspect, Shinji Aoba, 42, was detained in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but local authorities had to wait months for him to recover from serious burns before formally placing him under arrest.

A Japanese court on Tuesday sentenced a man to death for killing and dismembering nine people, most of whom had posted suicidal thoughts on social media, in a case that shocked the country. The Tachikawa branch of the Tokyo District Court found Takahiro Shiraishi, known as the “Twitter killer,” guilty of killing, dismembering and storing the bodies of the victims in his apartment in Zama, near Tokyo.

Queer Japan (★★★☆☆) reflects the ethos of “live and let live.” Leaving seemingly no LGBTQ+ stone unturned, the movie maps out queer scenes and spaces from Tokyo to Kyoto, Osaka to Okinawa, covering the mainstream and the underground, the artistic, erotic, and unconventional.The film could be accused in its first half of overindulging a taste for the offbeat, focusing exclusively on sex and gender mavericks like gay manga artist Gengoroh Tagame.

As the title suggests, the documentary “Queer Japan” is big and broad, not focused.

Tokyo-based pay TV company Wowow has acquired theatrical distribution rights in Japan for Songbird, the pandemic-set sci-fi thriller produced by Michael Bay and former Paramount president Adam Goodman. The pickup is Wowow's first major acquisition through the new theatrical distribution division the company set up earlier this year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief“Songbird,” the Michael Bay-produced pandemic thriller that is headed straight to streaming in North America, will be given an in-cinema release in Japan. The rights pickup was the first acquisition by the newly-formed theatrical distribution arm of Japanese pay-TV leader Wowow.The film takes place years in the future, in which a mutated strand of coronavirus, called COVID-23, continues to wreak havoc on the world’s population.