Japan's AMAGOI moonshot starts field trials over Toyama Bay in December 2026, seeding winter snow clouds with dry ice. Its own published flight log shows how hard it is to prove anything worked.

Seven in ten Japanese bookstore companies were profitable in fiscal 2025, but only 13.4% grew both sales and profit, on a 0.6% margin. What lifted the numbers, and why bookshops are multiplying in the US and Britain.

Kikkoman's third US soy sauce plant has opened in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a $560 million investment. Fifty-five years after a village voted 54 to 14 on the first one, North America now supplies two-thirds of group profit.

Tokyo's resident registry shows the city added 75,018 people during 2025, and 62,478 of them were foreign residents: 83 percent of the growth. Count only Japanese residents and Tokyo is down 3,238 over five years.

GO, Waymo and Nihon Kotsu want driverless taxis in Tokyo in 2027. Japan has had a permit regime since 2023, but the permits granted so far cover fixed lines: a 2 km cart route, a 700 m shuttle, a busway.

Japan's automatic ticket gates opened at Kitasenri in 1967. Sixty years of punched holes, magnetic standards and IC cards later, the QR switch in spring 2027 takes the journey data off the short-distance ticket.

On September 11, 2026, 25 Fields Medalists signed a declaration on AI and mathematics. Headlines read it as a revolt against AI. The real target was AI companies using math problems as a benchmark.

A Japanese team pinned down when CD4 killer T cells start to expand: right around age 100. The study needed blood from ten donors over 110, and the cohort that could supply them took thirty years to build.

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.