Advanced materials, chemicals, fibers and ceramics.
TOK has finished a 23-billion-yen photoresist building in Koriyama. Its 2023 and 2026 releases mention neither AI nor capacity; its earnings documents show how demand and the start date shifted in between.
An Osaka-led Japan-US team tells left- and right-handed amino acids apart one molecule at a time. Soai's Nobel shows a tilt can grow from chance, and asteroids Ryugu and Bennu show none, so detectors must read both.
Bridgestone left F1 in 2010 and lost a bid to return in 2023. From December it supplies every Formula E car, on tyres it says are 65% recycled and renewable, a figure that partly relies on mass-balance accounting.
Chihaya Adachi, a 2026 Citation Laureate, was first author of a 2001 paper on iridium-based OLEDs, then created TADF, which needs no rare metal. Yet iridium, mined at about 7 tonnes a year, is still in OLED screens.
Japan's NIMS built a molecular sheet where some electrons act massless and others barely move. What that means, how a bamboo-basket word entered physics in 1951, and what the material might one day be used for.
Japan's National Institute of Genetics and Danish partners built a photovoltaic retinal implant with carbon electrodes and 40-micrometer pixels. The implant already in patients uses 100, and that width sets the ceiling.
Japan counted 6,220 university spinouts in October 2025, more than double the 2,905 five years earlier. A gene-edited sea bream and a pigment-free coating are the way in. Each Japanese listing raises only $28 million.
Kyoto University's deep foam photolithography makes white out of air instead of titanium dioxide, prints it at about 20,000 dpi and repels water without PFAS. Why the timing is European, and what Japan tried before.
Desalination makes about 35 trillion liters of fresh water a year and discards roughly 50 trillion liters of brine. A Tokyo lab drips it onto molten tin and recovers magnesium oxide, 280 times concentrated.
Hafnium keeps advanced chips and jet engines running, yet the world makes about 71 tonnes a year, nearly all of it in France and the United States. An Osaka chemical maker now wants a share of it by 2028.
China's rare earth magnet shipments to Japan fell 52.2% in July 2026 while US-bound shipments rose 4.6%. Japan tells itself pressure breeds breakthroughs. Optical glass and neodymium magnets agree; aluminium does not.