Japan is hosting an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for a space-elevator machine to power carriages that climb 22,000 miles into space on a carbon nanotube fiber.

Japan's military successfully shot down a dummy ballistic missile in a joint test with the United States, the Defense Ministry said on Thursday, days after reports that North Korea had tested new missile engines.

Japan yesterday signed a deal to receive data on possible tsunami activity from seismic and hydroacoustic sensors operated by an international nuclear detonation monitoring organization.

Japanese lawmakers voted Friday to allow the military use of space, breaking a decades-old taboo in the officially pacifist country which has an increasingly ambitious space programme. The move will remove any legal obstacles to building more advanced spy satellites.

Asia's race to the Moon began yesterday when Japan launched an unmanned lunar probe, the most ambitious mission of its kind since the United States' Apollo missions of the 1970s.

China has dismissed suggestions that it is in a race with Japan to put a space probe in orbit around the moon.

Japan is considering revising its "Space Basic Law" to allow for the creation of an executive-level Space Strategy Headquarters that would promote the use of space for self-defense purposes. The move is seen as a response to the growing threat from North Korea.

The Japanese space agency used an H-IIA rocket Saturday to successfully place a radar satellite in orbit to complete Japan's spy system for full global coverage.

Japan will not respond to North Korea's nuclear test by developing its own atomic weapons, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Tuesday, although analysts said the nation has the technology to quickly pursue such a path.

As the only nation devastated by nuclear weapons, Japan has long held to pacifism. There's been virtually no public debate about whether the country needed nuclear weapons, although they're well within its technological grasp. But a combination of factors - including the nuclear threat from North Korea, the rise of China, the ebbing of once-strong peace movements and Japan's rightward drift - have chipped away at old taboos.