Sushi shop bankruptcies in Japan rose 45.5% in the first half of 2026, yet only 18.8% were losing money, the lowest in Teikoku Databank's 20 years. They are not failing. They close because nobody takes over.

A team from Osaka, Okayama and Tokyo has found why IgG antibodies outlast IgM. After mRNA vaccination, spike-specific cells were 0.14% of the long-lived bone marrow compartment, against 7.3% for influenza.

Three fossils, two of them picked up by amateurs more than twenty years ago, sat in a Hokkaido museum drawer until a CT scan added ten million years to a family of ammonites long thought extinct.

Mitsubishi is bringing the Pajero back after seven years with a plan for just 10,000 units. The shares moved anyway. What a nameplate is worth to a carmaker that sold 797,000 vehicles last year.

Japan's NIES has made iPS cells from four endangered birds. The flightless Okinawa rail has lost one of the two genes birds use to spot a virus. Inside the minus-160°C cell bank and the brain organoids grown from it.

Astellas and Kyowa Kirin are the first Japanese drugmakers to sign most-favored-nation pricing deals with Washington. A September 29 tariff deadline explains the timing, and Japanese prices sit inside the U.S. formula.

Rausu, Rishiri, hosome, ma-kombu: four kelps sold under four names and four price tiers. A Hokkaido University team read the DNA of 475 plants and found no genetic line between them.

Japan recorded 86,473 IVF births in 2024, about 1 in 8 of its 686,173 births. Treatments fell to 550,265 while the multiple-birth rate rose to 4.15 percent, and the 2022 insurance reform helps explain both.

A University of Tokyo and Arc Institute team has shown how the IS621 jumping gene cuts itself out of an E. coli genome, resolving a chicken-and-egg puzzle that had stood since 2024.