BBC News website launches Japanese language site By Angus Foster

World Editor, BBC News website Published duration 13 October 2015

Starting today, you will be able to read and watch some of the BBC news website's best text and video stories on a new, Japanese-language site.

Our Tokyo-based editors will be selecting news, features and analysis to give Japanese readers an overview of the most important international stories we publish each day on our English-language editions around the world.

And they will bring the BBC's global perspective to news about Japan that the rest of the world is interested in.

You can see for yourselves by following this link or bookmarking http://www.bbc.com/japanese

The new website is commercially funded and is not paid for in any way by the UK TV licence fee.

We hope it will really help build our presence in Japan, where the BBC's English-language website and World News TV channel are already popular.

Japan has a very important and sophisticated audience for internet news and social media.

Our research shows that each month nearly a million users of our English-language site come from Japan, and for 90% of these people, Japanese is their first language.