Tokyo closes out its wildest week in months. Governor Ueda held rates at 1% this afternoon but paired it with a hawkish inflation warning, whipsawing a yen that had spiked overnight on suspected intervention. Tokyo's benchmark staged a sharp rally into the close, riding the same AI-relief wave that sent Microsoft to a record one-day market-cap gain and South Korea's Kospi to the biggest single-day surge in its history. Kioxia and Sony both posted blockbuster earnings as Kumamoto's earthquake recovery entered its final phase.
Ueda holds at 1%, then warns inflation is set to run hot — the hawkish half of a "hold"The Bank of Japan's board voted 8-1 to keep the policy rate at 1.0%, with the lone dissenter pushing for an immediate move to 1.25%, according to CNBC and Nikkei Asia. The board trimmed its fiscal 2026 core inflation forecast but paired that cut with a warning that underlying price pressure is likely to run "clearly above" the 2% target from the back half of the fiscal year — an unusual combination that reads as hawkish despite the headline hold. Ueda told reporters the board could accelerate the pace of hikes if financial conditions demand it, leaving October and December both live for the next move.
The yen's overnight spike unwinds as Bessent calls it undervaluedUSD/JPY has drifted back weaker through the day, giving back a chunk of the overnight spike into the 157 range this brief flagged this morning, according to Investing.com, as the BOJ's hold took some of the sting out of the intervention move without erasing the currency's underlying weakness. In an unusual public intervention of his own, US Treasury Secretary Bessent said the yen looks undervalued, according to NewsOnJapan — rare direct currency commentary from Washington that lands the same day Tokyo was already fielding intervention questions, and that Japanese officials left the door open to a coordinated move if the pair keeps sliding, per NewsOnJapan.
Tokyo posts its sharpest rally in weeks as the BOJ hold and Wall Street's AI relief collideTokyo's benchmark and TOPIX both surged broadly into the close, with the chip-equipment complex — Advantest (6857), Tokyo Electron (8035), Disco (6146) — and SoftBank (9984) leading, as relief over the BOJ's hold combined with the same Microsoft-fueled AI rebound that lit up Wall Street Thursday night, according to NewsOnJapan. It's a sharp reversal from the selloff this brief tracked through the middle of the week, and it landed on the same day South Korea's own chip complex posted a historic surge of its own (full detail in Global, below).
Kioxia's quarter blows past its own guidance, and the next one is bigger stillKioxia (285A) reported April-to-June net profit up roughly 46-fold from a year earlier on explosive AI-driven NAND demand, according to Asahi Shimbun, and guided to a 31-fold year-on-year jump for the current July-to-September quarter, according to Nikkei Asia. The company is benefiting from the same memory-pricing crunch that Apple's own Tim Cook called a "hundred-year flood" on his final earnings call this week (full detail in Tech, below) — a reminder that the same shortage squeezing Apple's margins is filling Kioxia's.
Sony lifts its full-year outlook again, even as quake damage stays an open questionSony Group (6758) posted first-quarter operating profit up 40% to 476.5 billion yen and raised its full fiscal 2026 profit forecast to 1.72 trillion yen from 1.60 trillion yen, on strength in gaming and image sensors, according to Japan Today and Investing.com. Sony separately confirmed it has secured enough memory supply to meet this year's PS5 production plans even as GTA 6 demand looms, though the company has yet to quantify what, if anything, this week's Kumamoto earthquake cost its own image-sensor manufacturing.
Kumamoto's search operations wind down at every site but oneRescue crews have concluded their search at every site tied to Tuesday's earthquake except the collapsed Kashima shopping mall, according to Japan Today, with the confirmed toll still at 34. Families whose homes were destroyed are now sleeping in their cars, according to Al Jazeera, and local hospitals are still working through their own disruption as the region shifts from rescue to recovery.
Retail attention pivots hard toward Apple and Amazon after their own printsApple and Amazon are the two names showing up at once in both ApeWisdom's Reddit mention tracker and Robinhood's list of top-held stocks, according to ApeWisdom — a genuine cross-source overlap the pipeline flagged today, after Apple's mentions more than tripled and Amazon's more than quintupled in the past 24 hours following Thursday's earnings prints (full detail in Tech, below). It reads as retail attention tracking the earnings calendar directly rather than a standalone positioning signal, with names like Microsoft and Micron slipping in the rankings as the spotlight moved to the two names that reported hours ago.