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.
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.
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.
Japan's Patent Office has issued a final rejection of Nintendo and The Pokemon Company's application for a touchscreen creature-capture patent. The decisive prior art was a 2013 fan-made 3D Pokemon video, and the examiner dismissed Nintendo's argument that a copyright-infringing video cannot count. Here is what it means for the Palworld lawsuit, fact separated from speculation.
Japan's Diet passed the FIEA amendment on July 15, making crypto a financial product under the same law that governs stocks and bonds. Insider trading rules, tougher penalties, and disclosure duties arrive with it, and the preconditions for a 20% flat tax and domestic crypto ETFs are now cleared. Enforcement is expected in fiscal 2027, with the tax change from January 2028. Meanwhile, the US CLARITY Act remains stuck in the Senate.
Japan's finance minister has again signaled support for domestic crypto ETFs. But under current law crypto is not an eligible asset for a Japanese fund, so no spot ETF can be built. The bill that fixes that became law on July 15, 2026. Here is the honest answer to the three questions global investors ask: when, which tokens, and at what tax rate.
Japan's government just promised over 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion) across 17 strategic sectors by 2040. We unpack the suspicious arithmetic: a 6.5x return promised on chips, an undisclosed public-private split, and a deadline conveniently 14 years away.
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.
The Bank of Japan began selling its ETFs, yet its holdings ballooned past 110 trillion yen, over 8% of the Tokyo market. Why the Fed and ECB never bought stocks, how Switzerland differs, and whether central banks should own equities at all.
Japan discards 650,000 tons of small electronics a year, yet recovers only a little over a tenth of it. The rest mostly leaks abroad through an untracked invisible flow. On June 5, 2026, the Environment Ministry picked six pilots enlisting movers and couriers to keep the metals home.
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.