Dysprosium and terbium, essential to EV magnets, were China's one unbroken monopoly. In 2025, Australia's Lynas, backed by Japan since 2011, produced them outside China for the first time. What it means, and what it doesn't.
JX Advanced Metals, maker of roughly 60% of the world's sputtering targets, is investing about 23 billion yen to expand its Hitachinaka plant by 1.6x and selling its Chilean copper mine stake to Lundin Mining for $215 million, redirecting the cash into chip materials. A look at a 120-year-old miner remaking itself as an advanced-materials company.
A fresh 150-billion-yen government injection pushes the state's share of Rapidus's capital to roughly 60%. Yet Tokyo capped its voting rights at 11.5%, keeping the firm out of state-enterprise territory by design. We unpack subsidies versus equity, the fate of the 2nm skeptics, and the question of who will actually buy the chips.
On June 5, Capcom published the Q&A summary from its May 13 earnings briefing. Executives said they are weighing a sequel to Pragmata, the brand-new IP that sold 2 million copies in 16 days, restated their line that creativity stays in human hands while AI handles routine work, explained why console price hikes aren't in their plan, and detailed the catalog strategy behind a Resident Evil series that just passed 200 million lifetime units.
A Chiba startup has rebuilt yokan into an energy bar now test-selling in Japan and Australia. Here is why this centuries-old confection is one of the smartest survival foods ever made.
METI has unveiled Japan's first post-Fukushima numeric target for replacing nuclear reactors: up to 5 by the 2040s, 14 by the 2050s. Behind the decarbonization, energy-security and AI-demand drivers lies a harder question — regulatory capture, the Nuclear Village, and whether the regulator can be trusted.
Why did Yamasa, a soy sauce maker founded in 1645, end up in pharmaceuticals? The story of how umami research led to nucleotides, and to pseudouridine, a key ingredient in mRNA vaccines.
ROHM and Quanmatic put quantum annealing to work on a chip fab's front-end process, lifting output about 3%. Here's why a number that sounds small is actually a big deal on a factory floor.
SBI is rolling Claude out across its entire financial group and bolting it onto the on-chain finance rails it has spent years building. Unlike NEC or Fujitsu, this is a user, not a vendor. We compare how Japan, the US and the EU are wiring AI into finance, regulation included.
Japan's government and three megabanks gained access to a frontier AI model for cyber defense, with the digital minister calling to expand it to critical infrastructure. Set against the new US executive order and the EU AI Act, here is how Tokyo's approach differs.
A single fusion reactor needs about 10,000 km of high-temperature superconductor tape, and five years ago almost no one could make that much. Now four Italian physicists at startup Suprema are building Europe's largest tape plant to break in. But the companies that already dominate this wire are mostly Japanese: two of the four global fusion-grade producers are based in Japan. Inside the race over the thin ribbon fusion runs on.