On April 13, 2029, the 450m asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 km above Earth. Japan and Europe are joining forces on RAMSES, the next planetary defense mission after NASA's DART. JAXA provides the infrared imager, solar panels, and H3 rocket launch as a rideshare with DESTINY+, stepping up as US budget cuts threaten its own Apophis mission.
At a Fireblocks event in Tokyo, SMBC Group CDIO Kazuho Isowa and Mitsui & Co.'s Shinsuke Waka outlined Japan's on-chain finance strategy. January 2028 will bring simultaneous tax and financial-law reforms. ZipangCoin is going cross-border on public chains. And 95% of JPYC trades are now executed by AI. We compare Japan's cooperative model with JPMorgan's $5 billion-a-day Kinexys.
Japan's next-gen supercomputer Fugaku NEXT bets against the cooling consensus: warming water above 30°C to cool AI servers and cutting cooling power by 20%. It may also adopt 'ZAM,' a new memory developed by SoftBank and Intel that stands DRAM chips on edge with magnetic-field coupling. Why Japan is choosing efficiency over the gigawatt-scale arms race that defines US Frontier and El Capitan.
Japan's Resonac (formerly Showa Denko) will switch its Kawasaki ammonia plant to 100% waste-plastic-derived hydrogen by April 2030, ending its reliance on natural gas reforming. The world's only long-running commercial gasification chemical recycling plant processes 70,000 tons of plastic waste annually to produce 120,000 tons of ammonia, with 80%+ CO2 reduction. Now backed by Japan's first CCfD-style price-gap subsidy. A circular alternative to urban mining.
A Japanese team led by Prof. Takanori Takebe (Osaka & Science Tokyo) and Dr. Mureo Kasahara (National Center for Child Health and Development) plans the world's first pediatric clinical trial of UTOpiA, a bioartificial liver that perfuses blood through iPS-derived liver organoids. Animal trials showed 90% survival. How it compares with King's College London's HELP trial and Beijing's CiPS-BAL.
A Japanese team led by NAOJ has detected an atmosphere on a tiny trans-Neptunian object beyond Pluto for the first time, using stellar occultation observed from three sites across Japan. Why this rewrites textbooks on the outer solar system.
On May 1, METI summoned executives from 24 critical infrastructure operators—covering power, gas, oil, chemicals and credit cards—and ordered emergency cybersecurity audits within one month. The trigger: Anthropic's Claude Mythos, an AI announced April 7 that found a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD. We compare Japan's response with the US CISA OT principles and the EU's NIS2 Directive.
Kyoto University's iPS Cell Research Institute (CiRA) has succeeded in producing 'helper T cells'—the conductors of the immune system—from iPS cells without using mouse feeder cells. The breakthrough opens a path beyond the limits of $500K+ CAR-T therapy, especially for patients whose own immune cells are exhausted from chemotherapy. Here's how Japan's progress compares with US efforts at Memorial Sloan Kettering and China's surging T-cell pipeline.
Chinese optical fiber prices have surged 6.5x in a year. Visible demand: AI data centers. Hidden demand: disposable drones consuming millions of km of fiber on the Ukraine battlefield. China holds 60% of preforms, Japan leads in ultra-multi-core 13,824-fiber cables, and the US dominates hyperscaler contracts. A three-way battle reshaping AI infrastructure.
Yamaguchi's premium sake brand Dassai and Japanese engineering giant Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have successfully brewed sake in space for the first time in human history. The result: a single 100ml bottle priced at $700,000. Inside the Dassai MOON Project, the long-term plan to build a brewery on the Moon, plus practical brewery-tour info for international visitors in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi.
Japan's data center power consumption is set to triple by 2034, with 60 percent concentrated in the Tokyo region. The government's answer is Watt-Bit Integration. Compared with Virginia, Ireland, and Singapore, Japan's regional-distribution-plus-decarbonization approach offers a distinctive third way to manage the AI-era electricity crunch.
