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Reporting and analysis from the Morning Sun editorial desk.
Japan's defense chief has traveled to Australia to deepen a partnership built on the biggest arms export in his country's postwar history. The visit is about far more than frigates. It is about two democracies binding themselves together as the security of the Indo-Pacific grows more uncertain.
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The Japanese internet group best known for online shopping is helping broker military strike drones for the country's armed forces, teaming with Germany's Helsing, Europe's most valuable defense startup. It is a striking sign of how far Japan's rearmament and the lessons of Ukraine now reach into the corporate world.
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With a launch planned for the end of this year, Japan's MMX probe is being readied to fly to the Mars moon Phobos, scoop up a handful of soil and carry it home by 2031. If it works, Japan will hold the first material ever returned from the neighborhood of the red planet.
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Horse racing is shrinking across much of the world, yet in Japan the betting turnover keeps climbing past 3 trillion yen and a new generation of fans is pouring in. A smartphone-first betting culture and an unlikely anime hit have turned a centuries-old pastime into one of the country's quiet success stories.
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The Canadian investment giant has bought a portfolio of rental buildings across four major Japanese cities in its first push into the country's housing market. The deal is a fresh sign of the global money flooding toward Japanese real estate, drawn by cheap borrowing and steady rents.
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Barely a week after Japan and the United States spent billions to haul the yen back from a 40 year low, the currency has surrendered half of those gains. Now Tokyo is leaning on words instead of money, threatening more action while traders quietly test whether the authorities will really pull the trigger again.
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Vladimir Putin has made his debut visit to the contested Kuril Islands, touring a fish plant and a hospital on territory Japan insists is its own. The trip drew a furious protest from Tokyo and pushed the two countries' oldest quarrel further from any resolution.
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Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the first outsider to run the holding company at the heart of the Tata empire, will leave in early 2027 after refusing to rule out a stock market listing the family trusts do not want. His exit lays bare a rare and public struggle over the future of a 158 year old institution.
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This earnings season has handed Japan's global champions a familiar gift. With the yen slumping past levels most companies had cautiously assumed, exporters and retailers alike are raising their forecasts, led by a Sony profit that jumped by nearly a third. The windfall is real, and so are the risks of leaning on it.
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With interceptor stocks running low and Russian missiles finding gaps in his skies, Ukraine's president is pressing South Korea to share the air defenses it has so far kept out of the war. Seoul's long reluctance is now complicated by the North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side.
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Toyota nearly doubled its quarterly profit even while selling fewer cars, as the soft yen turned every overseas sale into a bonanza back home. The cheap currency is papering over real troubles, from US tariffs to a collapse in Chinese sales and a war that has doubled shipping times to the Middle East.
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Moonshot AI has released the largest open-weight model the world has seen, a 2.8 trillion parameter system that anyone can download for free. Kimi K3 still trails the very best from the United States, but its arrival is a loud reminder that export controls have not frozen China's climb.
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Japan Airlines and ANA both booked their highest ever quarterly sales as foreign visitors flooded back, yet the celebration was short lived. A surge in jet fuel prices tied to conflict in the Middle East wiped out much of the gain, sending JAL's quarterly profit down 80 percent and ANA's lower as well.
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In a rare show of transatlantic muscle, Japan and the United States acted together in the currency market to halt the yen's slide to depths not seen in four decades. The coordinated buying handed the currency its biggest single-day jump since 2022 and put speculators betting against it on notice.
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For two decades China supplied most of Pigeon's profit. Now, with birth rates sliding across Asia, the maker of Japan's best-known baby bottles is pinning its next chapter on the United States, a market it has long neglected and must now learn almost from scratch.
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After cross-party talks collapsed without agreement, the prime minister has decided to press ahead alone, ordering her party to draft a temporary cut in the consumption tax on food from 8 percent to 1 percent. It is a signature pledge finally moving, and a fiscal gamble whose bill will come due later.
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A shallow magnitude 7.1 quake tore through Kumamoto Prefecture on Tuesday afternoon, buckling part of a shopping mall, cracking the stone walls of the region's famous castle and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes. A brief tsunami warning was issued and then lifted as the region braced for aftershocks.
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ChangXin Memory Technologies rocketed on its first day of trading in Shanghai, closing the session worth more than Intel and cementing its place as Asia's biggest listing of the year. The frenzy captures both the money chasing China's chip ambitions and the questions hanging over the price.
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A fresh Nikkei survey puts the prime minister's approval at 58 percent, a fall of 10 points in a single month and the first time her cabinet has dropped under the 60 percent line since she took office. The steepest damage is among unaffiliated voters, the group that decides Japanese elections.
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The Takaichi government is knitting together a cross-agency body meant to bring order to a subject that has become one of the most charged in Japanese politics. The goal is a single command post for everything from residency rules to over-tourism, and it arrives as public anxiety over foreigners keeps rising.
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The Japan Innovation Party is spending the final days of an extended parliamentary session pushing the two bills it demanded as the price of joining the government. With the opposition walking out and cracks showing inside the ruling camp, the party is testing how much its partnership with the Liberal Democrats can actually deliver.
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The prime minister leans on the Japan Innovation Party to pass laws through the upper house, yet the very bills that bind the two sides together are splitting her own Liberal Democrats and dragging her approval ratings down.
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Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has recast his cabinet and rebranded the trade ministry to foreground energy, a signal that securing power supply now ranks alongside trade as a pillar of the city state's economic strategy.
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Prosecutors say a onetime deputy manager copied protected process technology to hand to Chinese interests, the island's first indictment accusing a chip insider of steering national core secrets across the strait. They are seeking a seven year prison term.
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Chief executive Kei Uruma wants the three Japanese manufacturers to announce a joint venture by September, a combination that would create the world's second largest power semiconductor group behind Infineon.
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With price growth finally closing in on its long-sought target, the Bank of Japan heads into its late-July meeting facing a familiar question. Governor Kazuo Ueda has signaled that rates still need to rise, but he is in no hurry to say exactly when.
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Xu Yang, who led the core Anta label at the heart of China's biggest sportswear group, is leaving as sales growth cools and the company pulls back from two ambitious retail experiments. His exit lands at a delicate moment for a firm with global ambitions.
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The world's most important chipmaker is pouring a further 100 billion dollars into its US operations and lifting this year's spending plans, wagering that the hunger for artificial intelligence hardware is only getting started.
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As American border checks on imported goods grow stricter, Amazon is putting warehouses near China's biggest ports so its Chinese merchants can prepare shipments that clear customs cleanly. The build-out points to a future where getting goods across the border matters as much as making them.
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Paulius Stankevicius, chief executive of Stankevicius Group, says the firm is ready to buy small digital services across the Asia Pacific region, from online games to messaging tools and pocket-sized social apps, provided they can show at least 5,000 active monthly users.
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The Chinese giant wants to ship as many as 60 million handsets this year, a bold step in its comeback from US sanctions. Standing in the way is a global shortage of the memory chips every phone depends on.
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For the first time since the 2021 coup, the junta's foreign minister sat with his regional counterparts. The gesture signaled a thaw in tone, yet the bloc offered warmth without dropping a single one of its demands.
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The century old sporting goods maker is stepping into competitive gaming with an unusual pitch. Treat the players as athletes whose bodies need care, and sell them the conditioning that traditional sports have taken for granted for decades.
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The northern port once dreamed of becoming a Hong Kong of its own, an open, market-driven gateway to the world. Its rise and its stall carry a lesson for two capitals that keep reaching for the state's hand.
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Fast Retailing lifted its forecasts again after a strong quarter, and now stands to sell more clothing than H&M for the first time. The milestone caps a long, patient climb from a single Japanese chain into a global heavyweight.
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CSBC spent years struggling to compete with cheaper Asian yards on commercial vessels. Now the company is rebuilding itself around submarines and sea drones as the island races to arm its waters.
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Yan Junjie built a paper fortune worth more than 12 billion dollars when his AI startup went public. A brutal slide and a flood of newly tradeable shares have now erased most of it.
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A rapidly expanding warhead stockpile and a new generation of missile submarines are giving Beijing a credible sea-based deterrent for the first time, reshaping the strategic balance across the Pacific.
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A generation raised on the safety of the bank deposit is now cutting daily spending to feed tax-free investment accounts, driven by a fear of missing the rally and a deeper worry about what retirement will look like.
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A senior voice in Japan's drone sector says the two economies are letting mismatched regulations slow a partnership that could reshape the region's supply chains, and wants Tokyo to loosen its limits on defense work.
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Chinese brands outsold their Japanese rivals in Europe for the first time in May, led by a roughly 70 percent jump in BYD overseas sales, as subsidies blunted the impact of EU electric vehicle tariffs.
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Japan has lifted its visa fee to five times its former level while cutting passport costs at home, a two sided attempt to ease overtourism and rebalance the flow of travelers.
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A Jakarta court sentenced Gojek co-founder and former education minister Nadiem Makarim to 10 years in prison and an 810 billion rupiah fine over a school laptop procurement program, a verdict business leaders fear could chill investment.
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Substack is expanding in Japan and has named former ByteDance executive Oki Ito to lead partnerships, wagering that local writers and artists will build paying audiences and reach readers worldwide.
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Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are set to endorse a roughly 3 billion dollar hydrogen and ammonia venture led by IHI and ACME Group during her visit to New Delhi.
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President Trump ordered strikes on Iranian targets, accusing Tehran of breaking a week old ceasefire after a drone hit a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
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Beijing stripped a group of military commanders, a former financial regulator, and a Politburo member of their lawmaker seats, extending Xi Jinping's long running purge.
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An extra 13 billion dollars lifts Amazon's India commitment to 48 billion through 2030, with most of the new money flowing into cloud and AI infrastructure.
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DSC Holdings raised 51 million dollars in New York, becoming the first Chinese company to clear the cross border IPO maze in 2026.
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Shares in Masayoshi Son's conglomerate fell more than 12 percent after a report that OpenAI may delay its market debut, dragging Asian tech stocks down with it.
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The two aerospace giants would fit Airbus's Eurodrone with Kawasaki Heavy's submarine hunting systems and pitch the unmanned patrol aircraft to Tokyo.
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Julie Kim, the Japanese drugmaker's new chief, plans to build on her predecessor's reforms and lean on artificial intelligence to run a leaner biopharma operation.
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Defense ministers Shinjiro Koizumi and Ahn Gyu-back advanced equipment and technology cooperation in Seoul, as shared threats push two wary neighbors closer.
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As the Strait of Hormuz swings between danger and calm, Chinese ship managers have turned the reading of risk into a core part of keeping global cargo flowing.
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Han Kuo-yu led a bipartisan delegation to meet US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a public show of support that crosses Taiwan's own party lines.
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As the Korean market swings on the fortunes of Samsung and SK Hynix, a surge in margin borrowing is raising the stakes for every investor in the rally.
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The chip names powering the region's artificial intelligence boom are riding a wave of leverage, and that same borrowing could make any downturn far sharper.
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Japan's prime minister meets Narendra Modi for the annual summit, joined by more than 50 companies hunting for new places to build in Asia.
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With the bloc's shortfall against China now running past 1 billion euros daily, Brussels is reaching for diversification, anti dumping measures, and tighter customs.
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Tokyo is spreading its purchases of the key petrochemical feedstock across the United States, Europe, and beyond, trading Gulf dependence for supply security.
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One of the world's top coal exporters is struggling to keep the fuel flowing to its own plants, and industry insiders warn that more blackouts could follow.
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Voters in the Thai capital handed Chadchart Sittipunt more than 60 percent of the vote, endorsing the practical, street level governing style that defined his first four years.
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The advertising group is launching a venture called Ads for Humanity, built on a new app that verifies a real person before serving an ad and blocks impressions made by bots.
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Canberra is sharpening its world first age limit, warning platforms that fail to keep children off their services that fines could soon be twice as steep.
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The country's megabanks and its main policy lender are searching for ways to fund a 550 billion dollar promise to Washington without straining currency markets.
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A new wave of Japanese labels is betting on bold graphics and local motifs to win over young Thai shoppers, moving well beyond the reliable basics that made Uniqlo a regional staple.
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The Uniqlo owner is rolling out tougher audit standards across more than 700 factories as Europe prepares to hold brands accountable for conditions deep in their supply chains.
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