U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon will visit Japan from May 31 to attend a gathering of Japanese and African leaders on African development to be held in Yokohama, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said Friday. During his four-day stay through June 3, Ban is scheduled to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.

Japan has lodged a protest with the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo for the second time over a recent column that described the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "divine punishment," Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday. Saying the Japanese Embassy in Seoul lodged the protest with the newspaper on Thursday, Kishida told reporters that as the only country to have suffered atomic attack, Japan "can never accept this kind of view about atomic bombs."

A record 923,000 foreigners travelled to Japan in April, up 18.1 percent from a year earlier, taking advantage of a weaker yen and an increase in chartered flights, a government agency said Wednesday. The previous monthly high was 879,000 in July 2010, the Japan National Tourism Organisation said. Tourism has rebounded since 2011, when visitor numbers plunged following the massive earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan's northeast and sparked a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power plant in March that year.

Three Chinese government ships entered waters around disputed islands controlled by Tokyo on Thursday, Japan's coastguard said. The Chinese maritime surveillance vessels were spotted in the 12-nautical-mile zone off the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyus, in the East China Sea shortly before 9:30 am (0030 GMT), the coastguard said. It marks the latest in a long line of stand-offs between official ships from both sides as Beijing and Tokyo jostle over ownership of the strategically important and resource-rich islands.