Japan's calorie-based food self-sufficiency fell to a record-low 37% in fiscal 2025 while the production-value measure rose to 66%. A 48% rise in rice prices moved both. By production value, Japan ranks above the US.
KDDI's Buffmee and SoftBank's GaranAI launched in July 2026 on the same premise: use only licensed material, meter how much gets used, and pay publishers back. One sells to readers, the other to AI developers.
Design-sector bankruptcies in Japan reached 40 in the first half of 2026, up 166.6% year on year and the highest in 14 years. Tokyo Shoko Research names three forces, and generative AI runs through one.
On August 7 Japan's Financial Services Agency turns its crypto team from a councillor's office three levels down into a standalone division, one of five created that day. The EU and US answer it differently.
Prelude, Supra, Primera, Pajero: Japanese carmakers keep reviving retired nameplates. Four forces explain it, from trademark law and the EV-era heritage premium to a 1988 US import rule still moving prices in Japan.
Japan's food exports hit 897.7 billion yen (about $5.7 billion) in the first half of 2026, a record. Green tea rose 83.5% and yellowtail 69.0%, but the yen was 5.5% weaker, so about half the growth was currency.
Japan bought yen without warning on July 30, moving the currency five yen in an hour. The BOJ then held at 1% and warned inflation could overshoot, as Washington and Seoul moved too.
Diamond reports Sony has offered around 200 billion yen for Tamron, whose lenses outsell Sony's own in Japan. An activist fund had already overtaken Sony on the shareholder register.
The July 28, 2026 Kumamoto earthquake hit shindo 7 and stopped chip plants run by Renesas, Sony, Mitsubishi Electric, TSMC's JASM and Tokyo Electron. The fab the world watched was not the real chokepoint: a coater/developer plant with roughly 90 percent of the world market was.
Imabari Shipbuilding posted 600.5 billion yen in fiscal 2025, and with Japan Marine United the group now sits at roughly 1 trillion yen, about $6.1 billion. The bigger news of July 23 was a deleted clause: LNG carriers are back in scope.
NEC and Keio AI Center have developed a technique that turns ordinary smartphone video into a high-fidelity 3D model in as little as one minute. By pairing Gaussian splatting with its own AI, NEC cut generation time to one-tenth and taught the system to erase workers caught on camera. Commercial launch is targeted within fiscal 2027.