Square is available in Japan with the support and partnership of Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation (SMCC). Responsible for introducing Visa to Japan, SMCC is widely recognized and respected for its ability to provide a wide range of solutions, including a comprehensive and highly secure credit card and payment solution.

This marks the first international expansion for Square outside of North America, where they service over 4 million individuals and businesses. Square says that they are now processing over $15 billion in payments annually.

And like in North America, Square will take a 3.25% cut of transactions in Japan.

Here’s what Square co-founder and CEO, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, had to say about the move:

“I am honored to introduce Square to a country with a rich history of design, innovation and tradition. Square shares the same values and attention to detail in our products. Our tools are made to enable business owners to create a delightful, seamless experience for their customers. I look forward to Square assisting in Japan’s continued economic growth and entrepreneurship opportunities.”

Also, he’s been Vining the news:

Square: now available in Japan. squareup.com/jp vine.co/v/b9YgW3W6Wj7

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) May 23, 2013

You can check out Square Japan here.

Say hello to Scentee, a new accessory from Japanese company ChatPerf. It’s a small attachment for mobile devices that disperses scents from small liquid capsules loaded into it. Check it out in action below:

So, how would you actually use this? The developers at ChatPerf suggest that somebody could send a scent to a friend, or they could use it to augment a media experience. One example in particular is that the Scentee could disperse a gunpowder odor during a first-person shooter.

Using odors as a form of communication seems like a strane idea that might not catch on, but you just never know anymore. If it works as advertised, the smartphones of 2020 may have odor dispersals integrated within them.

Abe, whose primary objective is to stimulate percent inflation in his country’s struggling economy, has got several companies backing him, including lingerie house Triumph. Their bras are insanely popular in Japan and have a loyal following after concepts like “solar-powered” and “husband hunting” hit the markets. Their latest creation, the “Abenomics” model, won’t be for sale, but rather strictly used to promote for the brand.

“To link in with ‘Abenomics’ and its three arrows of growth economic strategy, we decided to create something aimed at women. So with that in mind, we came up with the ‘Branomics Bra’,” Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda said. “We’ve put in these pads that boost the bra’s cups by 2 percent. We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger.”

Wired reports that researchers have built a baseball-playing robot learns more about the game as it plays. In other words, it will miss the first few pitches, but it will slowly learn where the ball is most likely to come from. After a while, it will start to hit more pitches and become more proficient in baseball.

The robot is able to quickly learn baseball thanks to its new brain that emulates a brain with about 100,000 neurons. According to Wikipedia, the fruit fly and lobster both have about 100,000 neurons in their brains. In comparison, the human brain has about 85 billion.

It may not have as many neurons as a human, but the researchers hope this latest robot can help them produce more complicated brains in the future. The end goal is to have robots perform complicated tasks that only humans and advanced animals, like apes, dolphins and elephants, can perform.

[Image: Wired]

The quake was centered around 250 km (155 miles) Northeast of the town of Kuril’sk, Russia and 521 km (324 miles) Northeast of Nemuro, Japan. Kuril’sk is located on the string of islands located Northeast of Japan, and Nemuro is one of the Easternmost cities on the Japanese mainland. No damage has been reported as a result of the quake.

The National Weather Service’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has not issued a warning as a result of the earthquake, and neither has the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center.

Earlier this week, over two consecutive days, earthquakes hit Iran and Papua New Guinea. The earthquake that hit Iran was measured at a 7.8 magnitude on the Richter scale and caused multiple fatalities in a rural area of Pakistan. The 6.6-magnitude earthquake in Papua New Guinea caused no reported injuries.

PCWorld reports that Sony-backed ISP So-net has launched a domestic 2Gbps Internet service in Tokyo and six surrounding prefectures. The download speeds are twice as fast as Google Fiber, whereas the upload speeds are the same 1Gbps.

Surely this super fast Internet must cost an arm and a leg, right? Not at all. So-net is only charging 4,980 yen, or $51, a month on a two-year contact. That’s even cheaper than Google Fiber’s already ridiculously cheap $70 a month just for Internet.

Of course, there are a few reasons why Japan is able to rollout this super fast Internet and ISPs in the U.S. can’t. For one, Tokyo is closely packed in comparison to even our tightest cities making fiber rollout easy. The other, and more crucial, cause is that the Japanese government has been pushing for increased fiber proliferation in the country. Our own FCC has only just started to push for gigabit networks after years of saying 5Mbps down was good enough.

The moral of this story is not to say that Japan has better Internet than us, even if they do. The moral here is that the U.S. still has a long ways to go with its infrastructure before it can start to compete on a global scale. Google Fiber and other gigabit initiatives are doing their best, but we won’t see true results until we start seeing true competition that scares the incumbents into actually upgrading its infrastructure.

This case began in March of 2012 when a Japanese court demanded that Google delete certain search terms inside their autocomplete function – ones that related to a specific man whose identity is still being witheld. The man claimed that when his name was searched, suggestions popped up linking him to criminal activity of which he was innocent. Clicking through to the links provided led user to websites filled with further defamation.

Not only did the plaintiff allege that Google’s autocomplete results caused him pain and personal anguish, but they also contributed to him losing his job and being unable to procure another.

Now, the court has ruled that Google must alter their results in the case of this anonymous man. They also ordered that Google pay 300,000 yen ($3,100) for the man’s pain and suffering – but not the job loss as he couldn’t prove that the two were definitely linked.

Well, it’s another day, another foreign court making a ruling on Google autocomplete. We’ve seen plenty of this in the past. Back in January of 2012, Google chose to pay a fine issued by a French court over the company’s autocomplete results. A local insurance company complained that Google autocomplete associated their name with the term “esroc,” roughly translating to mean “crook” or “swindler.”

Later in the year, Google made another deal in a French case, this time involving autocomplete results that labeled certain high-profile celebrities and politicians as “Jewish.” The complaint was originally filed by French anti-racism groups.

Google has also been in trouble in Germany and Italy over their autocomplete results.

Of course, Google’s autocomplete results stem from an algorithm that is based on prior searches. Google does not manually select which terms pop up when you type in any query.

“Autocomplete is a feature of Google search that offers predicted searches to help you more quickly find what you’re looking for. These searches are produced by a number of factors including the popularity of search terms. Google does not determine these terms manually–all of the queries shown in Autocomplete have been typed previously by other Google users,” says Google.

But that hasn’t stopped courts from ordering that Google manually intervene in certain circumstances.

Since Google Search isn’t rooted in Japan, Google isn’t required to follow this ruling – just like they weren’t required to follow the previous injunction the court issued in the case (and they didn’t). The ruling, however, can be appealed.

More specifically, Namie-machi, a small city in Fukushima Prefecture that’s in the Fukushima exclusion zone. That means that although years have passed since the nuclear accident that occurred as a result of the great earthquake of 2011, Namie-machi’s residents are still unable to return to their city.

And that affects 21,000 people, according to a Google blog post.

Google’s Street View team combed through the deserted town, and what you have is some more stunning imagery from a natural disaster. Back in December of 2011, Google unveiled Street View imagery of the earthquake and tsunami-torn northeastern coast of Japan.

Here’s the kind of stuff you’ll see:

Namie-machi mayor Tamotsu Baba explains the above image:

This image shows an area located one kilometer inland from the Pacific Ocean. In the distance you can see Ukedo Elementary School. Nearby Ukedo Harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings, but suffered some of the worst tsunami damage. After being set off-limits, we have not been able to clean up the wreckage on the side of the road, including the many fishing boats that were washed several kilometers inland.

Baba goes on to heartbreakingly convey that some people just want to see the state of their home.

“Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities.”

You can start looking around Namie-machi today.

Amazon announced today that the 16GB Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ now retails for $269. The 32GB model now retails for $300. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE also got a price cut as the 16GB model now retails for $400, while the 64GB model retails for $500.

The price cut coincides with the tablet’s launch across select European countries and Japan. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ will set UK consumers back £229 ($341 USD) for the 16GB model or £259 ($386 USD) for the 32GB model.

“We’re thrilled with customer reaction to Kindle Fire HD 8.9”. Customers tell us they love our large-screen version of Kindle Fire HD for web browsing, email, gaming, watching TV shows, reading magazines, and more,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “As we expand Kindle Fire HD 8.9” to Europe and Japan, we’ve been able to increase our production volumes and decrease our costs. Across our business at Amazon, whenever we are able to create cost efficiencies like this, we want to pass the savings along to our customers.”

With the price cut, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is now the most affordable tablet of its size. Apple and Google best be taking notes on how to subsidize costs through content sales because Amazon has proven that it’s still king of this rather risky, but so far profitable, venture.

Google Public Alerts, first launched in the U.S. following hurricane Sandy, are now available in Japan. Public Alerts provide pertinent information about natural disasters and other emergency situations inside Google Search, Google Maps. and Google Now.

This is the first country that Public Alerts have reached since its U.S. launch.

Now, when people in Japan search Google or Google Maps for information pertaining to an earthquake, let’s say, the alert info will appear on both desktop and mobile right at the top of the search. There will be a link inside the alerts that will let users access “more info,” which will include full disaster profiles from the Japan Meteorological Agency, among other stuff.

“We hope our technology, including Public Alerts, will help people better prepare for future crises and create more far-reaching support for crisis recovery. This is why in Japan, Google has newly partnered with 14 Japanese prefectures and cities, including seven from the Tōhoku region, to make their government data available online and more easily accessible to users, both during a time of crisis and after. The devastating Tōhoku Earthquake struck Japan only two years ago, and the region is still slowly recovering from the tragedy,” says Google.

The Public Alerts are also featured on Google Now, and are tailored to the user’s location. “For example, if you happen to be in Tokyo at a time when a tsunami alert is issued, Google Now will show you a card containing information about the tsunami alert, as well as any available evacuation instructions,” says Google.

Google says that they are looking to expand these Public Alerts to other countries soon.