On June 16 the Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1.0%, the highest in 31 years, with Governor Ueda hospitalized and absent. We unpack the 7-1 vote, the lone hiker among major central banks, the still-weak yen, and Japan's swelling debt-service bill.
Japan's 2025 property investment topped the 2007 record, with foreign investors at 39%. We break down Tokyo's 0.9% office vacancy, 7.5% rent growth, and why the Japan-West interest rate gap is pulling global capital in.
Aquaponics rarely pays as a standalone farm. So how does Aomori's closed-school project plan to make money? By monetizing the cafe, tours, education and welfare work around the tank, backed by public funds.
αGEL is the Japanese gel that keeps a raw egg intact after an 18-meter drop. The same material hides in mechanical pencils, G-SHOCK watches and ASICS shoes, and now damps drone vibration.
From October 2026, Japan requires every employer to shield staff from abusive customers. Inside the 'customer is a god' myth, the front-line toll, and why most countries lack the word.
A team led by Japan's QST has shown, for the first time, a magnetic memory that writes with a laser pulse instead of current — and made it work on CoFeB, the alloy already inside commercial chips. Here's how, and why it matters for data-center power.
The University of Tokyo's Kono Lab, with Aisin and ARM Technologies, ran the world's first end-to-end demo storing green hydrogen in a room-temperature, non-flammable liquid, moving it between cities in a simple container, and generating power directly. We unpack the efficiency claims against ammonia and MCH, and how it diverges from US, European and Chinese hydrogen-carrier strategy.
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare says about 7.5 million internal Microsoft Teams messages were erased after a Toshiba maintenance error. Nearly three years of data vanished, and some records that count as official documents cannot be recovered.
When Artemis II passed behind the Moon, the crew went 40 minutes without a signal. A sustained lunar presence needs always-on infrastructure, not one-shot mission links. We trace what KDDI, the carrier that once relayed Japan's international calls, is building with laser comms and multi-hop relays, and ask how close it really is.
A Japanese radiative cooling film that stays below air temperature in direct sun, with zero electricity. How SPACECOOL dumps heat into space, its 29% energy cut in Saudi trials, and why passive cooling matters as the planet warms.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions is mass-producing the IMX711, a direct-conversion X-ray CMOS image sensor based on a pixel structure invented at Japan's RIKEN institute. With an industry-fastest 26,100fps and noise low enough to measure single X-ray photons, it ends a decades-old trade-off in X-ray imaging. Here's why battery makers, chip fabs and scientists are paying attention.