The government also revised up its assessment on the job market to say it is “improving,” as falls in the yen triggered by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s reflationary policies boost manufacturers’ profits and push down the jobless rate to levels before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

“Recent price developments indicate that deflation is ending,” the government said in a monthly economic report for August, offering a brighter view than last month when it said deflationary pressures were easing.

But it is too early to declare that Japan has made a sustained exit from deflation, according to an official who briefed journalists on the report, noting that doing so would require more lasting rises in consumer prices.

Japanese consumer prices rose in June for the first time in more than a year, although most of the increase was due to higher electricity bills rather than stronger demand that could drive a durable recovery.

The government has described the economy as in deflation since November 2009. Removing the word “deflation” from the report, or declaring that deflation is over, would herald a major success in its battle with price declines.

The government kept intact its assessment on the overall economy, saying it is “picking up steadily and showing some moves toward a sustained recovery.”

The upgrade in its assessment on the job market came in response to data showing Japan’s unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent in June, its lowest since October 2008. Last month, the report said the job market was improving, albeit with some signs of weaknesses.

Japan’s economy grew an annualized 2.6 percent in April-June to mark the third straight quarter of expansion as a pick-up in exports added to sustained strength in personal consumption.

That bodes well for Abe, who has made an end to economic stagnation among his top policy priorities, and the Bank of Japan, which offered an intense burst of monetary stimulus in April to achieve its 2 percent inflation target in two years.

Still, concerns remain.

Data earlier this week showed Japan’s core machinery orders fell in June and companies expect them to fall further in the current quarter, another sign that government stimulus has yet to boost capital spending as debate intensifies over how to address massive and growing public debt.

Second-quarter growth also was slower than expected, offering ammunition to those seeking to temper a planned sales-tax increase over fears it could stifle the economic recovery.

The hawkish Abe, who cemented his grip on power in an upper house election last week, has since then been signaling a desire for dialogue – even though Japan has raised its assessment of the risk of China’s military buildup and maritime assertiveness.

On Friday, Abe called for an unconditional meeting between Japanese and Chinese leaders – a proposal he repeated on Monday, according to Kyodo news agency. It said Abe had instructed diplomats to work towards that goal.

On Sunday, Isao Iijima, an adviser to the premier, told reporters that Abe could soon hold a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said no schedule had been set.

“As Prime Minister Abe has repeatedly said, he wants a mutually beneficial, strategic relationship and the door is always open for dialogue.

“However, there is no immediate schedule for a leadership summit,” Suga told a news conference on Monday.

Often fragile Sino-Japanese ties have been seriously strained since September, when a territorial row over tiny islands in the East China Sea flared following Japan’s nationalization of the uninhabited isles.

Concern that Abe, who came to power in December, wants to recast Japan’s wartime history with a less apologetic tone has added to the tension.

“Vice Minister Saiki will visit China on July 29-30 and exchange views with Chinese officials,” a Japanese foreign ministry spokesman said. He did not give further details.

China’s Foreign Ministry responded to Abe’s overture on Friday by saying its door was always open for talks but that the problem lay in Japan’s attitude.

Japan should “stop using empty slogans about so-called dialogue to gloss over disagreements”, the ministry said in a statement faxed to Reuters.

If implemented, some of the changes outlined by the interim Defense Ministry paper would be a major shift in policy for a military that is currently limited to self-defense and is banned from operating in overseas combat zones under a pacifist constitution.

Now that he is back in power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants the previous defense policy of the more moderate Democratic Party-led government revised to give Japan’s military more freedom and strength.

The report repeatedly cited China’s military and maritime activity as threats to regional peace and stability, and urged Japan to step up its capability to respond.

“China’s military trend includes high-handed actions that could trigger unforeseen situations, and has become security concerns to the region and international society including our country,” the report said. “National security environment surrounding our country is increasingly aggravating.”

The paper said Japan should increase its surveillance capability and consider using drones, or unmanned surveillance vehicles capable of wide-range, high-altitude monitoring around the clock. The paper also proposed creating a marine force with amphibious functions to defend disputed islands in the East China Sea.

It said the Japan-U.S. security alliance remains “the cornerstone” of Japan’s defense policy and urged Japan to step up its ability to respond to ballistic missile attacks amid concerns about North Korea’s nuclear and missile development.

A final report is expected at the end of this year.

“This will guide the focus of the direction that the Self Defense Forces should be heading going forward,” said Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said, outlining key components such as boosting warning and surveillance capabilities, amphibious functions, integrated transport, and anti-ballistic missile response.

On Thursday, Tokyo expressed unease over Chinese military and maritime activity near a group of islands that Japan controls but China also claims.

The victory gives the hawkish leader a stronger mandate for his “Abenomics” recipe to revive the economy and spells his personal political redemption after he led his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a humiliating defeat in a 2007 upper house election.

The ensuing parliamentary deadlock allowed the opposition to block legislation and led to Abe’s resignation two months later. That “twisted parliament” has hampered policies for most of the six years since and led to a string of revolving-door leaders.

“People wanted politics that can make decisions and an administration with a stable grounding, which led to today’s result,” LDP Vice President Masahiko Komura told public broadcaster NHK.

A woman casts her ballot at a polling station during the upper house election in Tokyo July 21, 2013 …

“‘Abenomics’ is proceeding smoothly and people want us to ensure the benefits reach them too. That feeling was strong.”

Abe, 58, who returned to power after a big win in December’s lower house poll for his LDP and coalition partner New Komeito, has said he will remain focused on fixing the economy with his “Abenomics” mix of hyper-easy monetary policy, fiscal spending and structural reforms.

But some worry that Abe’s resolve for economic reform could weaken in the face of a resurgent LDP. A landslide victory could bolster opposition to regulatory reform from LDP lawmakers with close ties to industries that would suffer from change.

Critics also worry Abe will shift focus to the conservative agenda that has long been central to his ideology, and concentrate on revising the post-war pacifist constitution and recasting Tokyo’s wartime history with a less apologetic tone.

Such a shift, along with moves to strengthen Japan’s defense posture, would further fray ties with China and South Korea, where bitter memories of Japan’s past militarism run deep. Tokyo is already engaged in tense territorial rows with Beijing and Seoul over tiny, uninhabited islands.

People holding Japanese national flags listen to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (not pictured) an …

“I have the impression that Prime Minister Abe wants to revise the constitution, though I don’t think it will be easy,” said apparel firm employee Etsuko Yamada, 35, who voted for the opposition Japanese Communist Party.

“I want him to show Japan’s presence through diplomacy with strong negotiating power, not though military power by spending money to rearm.”

YASUKUNI SHRINE TEST

Abe has declined to say whether as premier he will visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine for war dead, where Japanese leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as war criminals are also honored. A visit on the August 15 anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War Two would spark outrage in the region.

A Reuters poll showed Japanese firms generally wanted the LDP to win the election but they worry a landslide victory would allow Abe to prioritize nationalist policies over the economy, as critics say he did during his troubled 2006-2007 term.

A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Tokyo July 21, 2013. REUTERS/Yuya Shino

Final results will be known late on Sunday or early on Monday.

Media exit polls showed the LDP and New Komeito would win more than 70 of the 121 seats up for grabs in the 242-seat upper house.

With the coalition’s uncontested 59 seats, that hands it a hefty majority, solidifying Abe’s grip on power and raising the chances of a long-term Japanese leader for the first time since the reformist Koizumi’s rare five-year term ended in 2006.

No election for either house of parliament need be held until 2016.

The exit polls showed, however, that the LDP fell short of winning an upper house majority in its own right for the first time since 1989, although it could put in a better performance than in 2001, when the party was led by the popular Koizumi, broadcaster NHK said.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2nd R), and the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The LDP and two smaller parties that back Abe’s drive to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution to legitimize the military looked to fall short of the two-thirds majority needed to take revisions of the charter to a public referendum, the exit polls showed. Those parties have two-thirds of the lower house seats.

Despite the LDP-led bloc’s win, the party’s pro-nuclear power stance is unpopular, and plans to restart reactors that have been off-line since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster could run into trouble.

Abe will also have to decide whether to go ahead with an increase in a 5 percent sales tax to 8 percent next April, the first stage in a planned doubling of the levy to rein in Japan’s massive public debt.

The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which surged to power in 2009 to end more than half a century of almost non-stop LDP rule only to be ousted last year, suffered its biggest drubbing since its founding in 1998. Exits polls showed the party winning 21 or fewer seats. The result raises concern about prospects for a competitive two-party democracy.

Many anti-LDP voters, faced with a fragmented opposition, cast their ballots for the Japanese Communist Party to vent their frustration.

TOKYO: Japanese were voting Sunday in a parliamentary election expected to give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition a strong mandate, though initial reports showed turnout to be lackluster.

A victory would give Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and partner New Komeito control of both chambers of parliament — an elusive goal for the government in recent years. It also may provide the wherewithal for difficult economic reforms and progress on Abe’s a conservative political agenda that could further complicate already testy relations with China and South Korea.

Abe says his top priority is to sustain the economic recovery helped along by aggressive monetary and fiscal stimulus since he took office in late December. In the long run, that will require sweeping changes to boost competitiveness and help cope with Japan’s rapidly graying population and bulging national debt.

“I want them to carry on doing their best as the economy seems to be picking up,” said Naohisa Hayashi, a 35-year-old man who runs his own business.

Despite the potentially huge stakes for the election, early turnout was fitful, local media reported, with the rate of voters casting ballots down several percentage points in most areas.

The Asahi Shimbun’s head office in Tokyo said that all four of its microblogging accounts in China were shut down this week in what it described as an “abnormal situation”.

“It would be really regrettable if the accounts had been closed intentionally despite the large number of followers… we strongly request the operators reopen the accounts as soon as they can,” it said.

Users of Sina Weibo, a microblogging service similar to Twitter, said the newspaper’s account disappeared on Wednesday after having gathered around 1.3 million followers.

The reason for the account’s deletion was unclear. Sina, which runs the social media service, was not immediately available for comment.

It was not clear what services the other accounts were on.

A former social media editor for the newspaper, posting under the name Wangzuo Zhongyou, wrote that the accounts were taken down because of “instructions from above”, without giving details.

Some Sina Weibo users on Thursday posted icons of candles in memory of the account’s disappearance.

Beijing has previously blocked the websites of foreign media organisations including the New York Times and Bloomberg after they published reports on topics deemed taboo by the ruling Communist Party.

China and Japan have for decades disputed the ownership of a string of islands in the East China Sea known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

Beijing stepped up its rhetoric and sent patrol ships to surrounding waters after Tokyo nationalised three islands in the chain in September last year, in what it said was a mere administrative change of ownership from a private owner.

China insists the islands were part of its territory until Japan annexed them in 1895 at the start of a half-century of acquisitive invasions that culminated in World War II.

TOKYO: Keeping the meltdown-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in northeastern Japan in stable condition requires a cast of thousands. Increasingly the plant’s operator is struggling to find enough workers, a trend that many expect to worsen and hamper progress in the decades-long effort to safely decommission it.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that melted down in March 2011 after being hit by a tsunami, is finding that it can barely meet the headcount of workers required to keep the three broken reactors cool while fighting power outages and leaks of tons of radiated water, said current and former nuclear plant workers and others familiar with the situation at Fukushima.

Construction jobs are already plentiful in the area due to rebuilding of tsunami ravaged towns and cities. Other public works spending planned by the government, under the “Abenomics” stimulus programs of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is likely to make well-paying construction jobs more abundant. And less risky, better paid decontamination projects in the region irradiated by the Fukushima meltdown are another draw.

Some Fukushima veterans are quitting as their cumulative radiation exposure approaches levels risky to health, said two long-time Fukushima nuclear workers who spoke to The Associated Press. They requested anonymity because their speaking to the media is a breach of their employers’ policy and they say being publicly identified will get them fired.

TEPCO spokesman Ryo Shimizu denied any shortage of workers, and said the decommissioning is progressing fine.

“We have been able to acquire workers, and there is no shortage. We plan to add workers as needed,” he said.

The discrepancy may stem from the system of contracting prevalent in Japan’s nuclear industry. Plant operators farm out the running of their facilities to contractors, who in turn find the workers, and also rely on lower-level contractors to do some of their work, resulting in as many as five layers of contractors. Utilities such as TEPCO know the final headcount — 3,000 people now at Fukushima Dai-ichi — but not the difficulties in meeting it.

TEPCO does not release a pay scale at Fukushima Dai-ichi or give numbers of workers forced to leave because of radiation exposure. It does not keep close tabs on contracting arrangements for its workers. A December 2012 survey of workers that the company released found 48 percent were from companies not signed as contractors with the utility and the workers were falsely registered under companies that weren’t employing them. It is not clear if any laws were broken, but the government and TEPCO issued warnings to contractors to correct the situation.

Hiroyuki Watanabe, a city assemblyman for Iwaki in Fukushima, who talks often to Fukushima Dai-ichi workers, believes the labor shortage is only likely to worsen.

“They are scrounging around, barely able to clear the numbers,” he said. “Why would anyone want to work at a nuclear plant, of all places, when other work is available?”

According to Watanabe, a nuclear worker generally earns about 10,000 yen ($100) a day. In contrast, decontamination work outside the plant, generally involving less exposure to radiation, is paid for by the environment ministry, and with bonuses for working a job officially categorized as dangerous, totals about 16,000 yen ($160) a day, he said.

TOKYO: The Japanese military’s forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to “maintain discipline” in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle, an outspoken politician said in comments raising ire with Japan’s neighbors.

Asian countries that bore the brunt of Japan’s wartime aggression have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone forwartime atrocities.

Speaking Monday, young, brash Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, also told reporters there wasn’t clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called “comfort women.”

“To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time,” said Hashimoto. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone.”

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels.

An unidentified South Korean government official told Yonhap news agency it was disappointing that a senior Japanese official “made comments supportive of crimes against humanity and revealed a serious lack of a historical understanding and respect for women’s rights.”

Hashimoto’s comments come amid mounting criticism at the prospect of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative government revising Japan’s past apologies for wartime atrocities. Before he took office in December, Abe had advocated revising a 1993 statement by then-Prime Minister Yohei Kono acknowledging and expressing remorse for the suffering caused to the sexual slaves of Japanese troops.

Abe has acknowledged “comfort women” existed but has denied they were coerced into prostitution, citing a lack of official evidence.

Over the past two days, top officials in Abe’s government have appeared to ease their concern over Japan’s past apologies, apparently to calm tensions with South Korea and China and address U.S. concerns about Abe’s nationalist agenda.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters Tuesday that “the stance of the Japanese government on the comfort women issue is well known. They have suffered unspeakably painful experiences. The Abe Cabinet has the same sentiments as past Cabinets.”

Hashimoto is co-head of the newly formed Japan Restoration Party with former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who is a strident nationalist.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said sea changes were possible. No tsunami warnings have been issued.

The tremor struck around midday in the Pacific Ocean at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). The U.S. Geological Survey measured a stronger 7.2 magnitude.

Japan and Russia both claim some of the sparsely populated islands in the remote region.

The epicenter was 58 kilometers (160 miles) east-northeast of Kuril’sk, Russia, and 528 kilometers (328 miles) northeast of Nemuro, Japan.

The nearest land is the volcanic islands of Urup, Iturup and Sumushir. Hokkaido officials said the islands were not under Japanese control.

The area is about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) northeast of Tokyo.

TOKYO: A power outage has left four fuel storage pools at Japan’s tsunami-damaged nuclear plant without fresh cooling waterfor nearly 20 hours, raising concerns about the fragility of a facility that still runs on makeshift equipment.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that pool temperatures at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant were well within safe levels, and that pools would remain safe for at least four days without fresh cooling water. The utility said the reactors were unaffected and no other abnormalities were found.

The cooling system was restored at one of the four pools by mid-afternoon Tuesday, and the systems for the three other pools are expected to resume by Wednesday morning as workers complete repairs and try to determine the cause the problem, TEPCOofficials said.

Workers fixed the last of the three switchboards that they suspect as a possible cause of the problem and the utility was preparing a backup system in case the repairs didn’t fix the issue, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told reporters.

“If worse comes to worst, we have a backup water injection system,” Ono said.

Japan’s March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant’s power and cooling systems, causing three reactor cores to melt and fuel storage pools to overheat.

The current power outage is a major test for TEPCO to show if it has learned anything from the disaster. TEPCO, which has repeatedly faced cover-up scandals, was slammed by local media Tuesday for waiting hours to disclose the blackout.

Ono acknowledged the plant was vulnerable.

“Fukushima Dai-ichi still runs on makeshift equipment, and we are trying to switch to something more permanent and dependable, which is more desirable,” he said. “Considering the equipment situation, we may be pushing a little too hard.”

Ono said the utility did not immediately try to switch to a backup cooling system because doing so without finding and fixing the cause could lead to a repeat of the problem. There is a backup cooling system but no backup outside power.

Regulators previously have raised concerns about the makeshift equipment and urged the plant to switch them to a more permanent arrangement. The operator still has to remove melted, fatally radioactive fuel from the reactors before fully decommissioning the plant, which officials say could take 40 years.

Yoshihide Suga, the chief government spokesman, sought to allay concerns.

“In a sense, we have put in place measures that leave no room for worry,” Suga told reporters in a regular briefing.

The command center at the plant suffered a brief power outage before 7 p.m. Monday. Electricity was quickly restored to the command center but not to equipment pumping water into the fuel pools.

The temperature in the four pools had risen slightly, but was well below the utility’s target control temperature of 65 degrees Celsius, TEPCO said.