Students in Japan have taken to the sky in quite an unlikely contraption. A group of students from the Tokyo Institute of Technology flew in a plane powered only by household batteries.

A Japanese restaurant has come up with a fried whaleburger to attract the younger set. BBC reports that the sandwich, which features fried whale meat nestled in a bun with salad greens and lashings of mayonnaise and ketchup-based sauce, is the creation of a small whale restaurant in the town of Wada, about 100 km (62 miles) southeast of Tokyo.

To prove true to his girlfriend, a Japanese man who stole 340,000 yen ($2,300) from a post office returned more money than he stole. The 33-year-old stole the money at knife-point from a post office in western Tokyo in March. When he repented he went back to the post office at the end of May and left 350,000 yen in an envelope on the counter before running off, as was "sorry for what he had done", the Mainichi newspaper quoted the man as saying.

An unemployed man in Japan goes to the bank with an intention of looting it and asks the teller, "Any idea how you rob a bank?"The teller alerted another staff member, who asked the man to leave. "He left quietly when asked to," the Reuters news agency quotes a police spokesman as saying.

A former solider in the Japanese Imperial Army, who hadn't been seen by his family since he went off to fight in the Second World War and was declared dead in 2000, has resurfaced in Ukraine and is returning to Japan to see his relatives after 60 years. Ishinosuke Uwano, now 83, is expected to arrive in Japan tomorrow, accompanied by his Ukrainian son, to visit his surviving relatives in Iwate, about 290 miles north-east of Tokyo.