A magnitude-4 aftershock rattled Kumamoto's Amakusa region Sunday morning, no tsunami risk, a reminder the recovery is still live even as a second weather system takes aim at the country: Typhoon Dolphin's outer rain finally reached Kumamoto as forecast, and a new storm, Typhoon No. 15, is now tracking toward a possible Tohoku landfall around Tuesday. Kansai Electric's Oi plant lost a reactor to an overnight equipment alarm with no radiation leak, Sony pressed ahead on its bid to fully absorb lens maker Tamron, and fresh trade data confirmed South Korea and Taiwan have both overtaken Japan in total exports for the first time, powered by the same AI-chip boom that whipsawed Tokyo's own chip names all week. Markets stay shut until Monday, with Tuesday's Mountain Day holiday keeping the week short.
A magnitude-4 earthquake struck the Amakusa-Ashikita area of Kumamoto Prefecture at around 8:02am Sunday, with seismic intensity 4 recorded in Kamiamakusa City and intensity 3 in Minamata, Amakusa and Ashikita, according to NHK and Yahoo Japan. Japan's Meteorological Agency confirmed no tsunami risk. The tremor lands more than a week after last month's magnitude-7.1 quake devastated the same prefecture, and with a typhoon now bringing rain to already-loosened ground, it's a fresh reminder of how unsettled the region remains even as national attention has moved on to the recovery's slower, less dramatic phase.
Kansai Electric Power said Reactor 3 at its Oi nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture automatically shut down in the early hours of Sunday morning after an alarm triggered in generator-related equipment, according to Yahoo Japan. The utility said there was no radioactive leak and no impact on the surrounding area, describing the shutdown as the safety system functioning exactly as designed rather than a critical failure. It's a minor operational blip on its own, but one worth tracking given how central Oi and Japan's other restarted reactors have become to the country's post-2011 nuclear comeback.
Sony Group's non-binding proposal to acquire all remaining shares of lens maker Tamron and fold it into a wholly owned subsidiary continues moving through Tamron's special-committee review, with media estimates putting the deal near ¥200 billion ($1.3 billion), according to Investing.com and PetaPixel. Sony already owns just over 15% of Tamron as its second-largest shareholder, behind Singapore's Effissimo Capital Management, which built its own stake past 17% last month — a dynamic that reads as much like a defensive move to lock in control as an opportunistic buyout. If it closes, it would fuse the company that supplies the image sensors inside nearly every major mirrorless camera with one of the biggest independent lens makers building glass for those same cameras, a level of vertical integration the industry hasn't seen in decades.
South Korea and Taiwan each posted higher total exports than Japan in the first half of 2026 for the first time on record, with Korea's $496.3 billion and Taiwan's $416.6 billion both surging more than 50% year-on-year against Japan's $384.4 billion, according to Nikkei Asia. Integrated-circuit exports alone came to $149 billion for Korea and $133 billion for Taiwan — roughly 30% of each country's total — versus just $21.2 billion, or about 5%, for Japan, whose chip strength sits further upstream in materials and manufacturing equipment rather than the finished AI silicon itself. It's a structural marker on the same story that's been driving Tokyo's chip-equipment names in both directions all week: Japan is still deeply exposed to the AI-chip cycle, just from a different, lower-margin seat at the table than its neighbors.
Typhoon Dolphin's outer bands brought the rain to Kumamoto that forecasters had been warning about all week, arriving on already earthquake-loosened ground where authorities have flagged even modest rainfall as a landslide risk. A second system, Typhoon No. 15, is now tracking toward a possible Pacific-coast landfall in the Tohoku region as early as Tuesday afternoon, with peak sustained winds forecast near 23 meters per second and meaningful uncertainty still remaining over the exact track, according to News On Japan. A more southerly track would put the greater Tokyo region at higher risk of heavy rain instead — a detail worth watching into the middle of next week.
The Nikkei 225 closed Friday at 65,606.71, down 0.12%, with TOPIX also finishing higher on the day, according to confirmed pipeline data. USD/JPY sat near 158 as of Friday, testing the upper end of its post-intervention range as traders weigh whether September's BOJ hike still has enough behind it after last week's soft household-spending print. Markets stay closed Sunday and reopen Monday, when QD Laser, SHO-BOND Holdings and Sumitomo Metal Mining are all scheduled to report after the close — before Tuesday's Mountain Day holiday shuts the Tokyo Stock Exchange again and the BOJ's Summary of Opinions from its July meeting lands as the week's next real data point on the path to September.
Berkshire Hathaway posted second-quarter net income of $25.7 billion, more than doubling its first-quarter result, with operating earnings up 16.3% year-on-year as strength in energy, railroads and manufacturing offset softer insurance results, according to Forbes and Yahoo Finance. The bigger story is what CEO Greg Abel did with the cash: $19.8 billion in net stock purchases, including a fresh $10 billion stake split between Alphabet's two share classes, plus $4.5 billion in buybacks — the first quarter of net buying after 14 straight quarters of net selling under the Abel era's early caution. Berkshire also closed its $8.5 billion Taylor Morrison acquisition in the quarter, even as $365.5 billion in cash still sits on the balance sheet. Abel struck a more cautious tone on the outlook, saying insurance is becoming "a more challenging environment" as fresh capital keeps flowing into the industry.
Iran said Saturday it's nearing an agreement with Oman over a Strait of Hormuz shipping corridor, but insisted the arrangement won't reopen the waterway on its own — with any final deal requiring the US to meet a list of additional conditions, including compensation to Tehran, according to Investing.com and NPR. The proposed terms would bar US- and Israeli-linked vessels entirely and fine other violators up to 20% of cargo value, terms Washington has already signaled it won't accept. It's the same pattern that's held all week — genuine diplomatic movement, paired with terms neither side has actually agreed to yet — and for Japan, which imports the large majority of its crude through Hormuz, that gap between "close" and "done" is exactly what keeps the oil-price story unresolved heading into next week.
Bitcoin's divisive BIP-110 soft fork — which would cap how much arbitrary data transactions can carry — entered its decisive activation window this weekend with miner support sitting below 3%, well short of what's needed for a clean network-wide lock-in, according to CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. A minority of nodes have split onto their own chain rather than follow the majority network, according to The Block — a real but contained fracture rather than a market-moving event, with bitcoin's price largely undisturbed by the drama. The split lands in the same week US spot bitcoin and ether ETFs pulled in more than $1 billion, their best week since April, with BlackRock's funds alone taking in roughly 80% of the new cash, according to CryptoSlate — institutional flows and a niche protocol fight running on entirely separate tracks.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the CLARITY Act on Friday, queuing up a procedural vote for September 15 just as the chamber heads into its August recess, according to CoinDesk and Decrypt. The bill, which would set a federal framework for digital-asset regulation and clarify which agency oversees crypto exchanges, cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 back in May but has since stalled over unresolved fights on stablecoin yield rules and anti-terror-financing compliance. It's a modest but real step forward for an industry that's spent most of the year waiting on Washington to actually finish the job.
Bank of America says Nvidia is trading at roughly 16 times projected 2027 earnings, its cheapest forward multiple in a decade, and reiterated a Buy rating with a $350 price target, calling the stock its top sector pick, according to Investing.com. The bank's thesis rests on a roughly 0.3 price/earnings-to-growth ratio — historically cheap for a company BofA expects to nearly double earnings per share from around $3 to $6.63 between 2025 and 2027 — implying the market is pricing in a deceleration the bank doesn't think will show up. For Tokyo's chip-equipment names, whose fortunes have tracked Nvidia's order book all week, a valuation reset this sharp on an unchanged demand story is worth watching either as an opportunity or a warning, depending on which side of BofA's bet proves right.
SpaceX and Tesla are jointly funding Terafab, a $16.8 billion semiconductor facility in Texas expected to create at least 3,000 jobs, according to the Motley Fool — the clearest concrete step yet behind a week of swirling speculation about how closely the two companies' futures are becoming intertwined. SpaceX shares jumped 15.8% Friday as its first post-IPO lockup expiration passed without the broad insider selloff investors had braced for, according to Bloomberg, a sharp reversal from the stock's post-earnings slide earlier in the week over its own AI capital spending. It's a reminder of how fast sentiment is swinging on every AI-infrastructure name right now — the same stock that sold off hard on Tuesday's spending numbers rallied just as hard three days later on a lockup that simply didn't produce the selling everyone expected.
A planned Amazon data center in Texas would be powered by a roughly 7.65-gigawatt gas plant potentially large enough to become the single biggest emissions source in the US, running counter to the company's own 2040 net-zero pledge, according to TechCrunch. Nvidia, meanwhile, is taking the opposite approach to the same problem: the company has agreed to invest $2 billion — with another $1 billion tied to performance thresholds — in Lancium, the power-infrastructure developer behind the Stargate campus's energy supply, according to Techmeme, citing The Information. Two different hyperscale strategies for the same underlying constraint — one buying raw gas-fired capacity, the other investing directly in the infrastructure company managing supply — and both are a reminder that electricity, not chips, is increasingly the bottleneck the entire AI buildout is being built around.
Sony's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" pulled in an estimated $143 million in its second weekend, pushing its North American total to roughly $653 million after just 10 days — the highest 10-day domestic sum any film has ever posted, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The roughly 60% second-weekend drop still lands as the third-best hold in box-office history, trailing only "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." It's a genuinely rare data point for an industry that's spent years wondering aloud whether tentpole moviegoing still works — for ten days running, the answer has been an emphatic yes.
A new wave of small importers and independent producers is deepening Japan's natural-wine culture even as climate pressures and the weak yen squeeze costs on both ends, according to Nikkei Asia, which spent time at Tokyo wine bar Atelier de Terrine Maison Okei in Setagaya Ward watching staff walk customers through the category. What sets Japan's natural-wine crowd apart, according to people in the scene, is a genuine curiosity and respect for the wine itself rather than just chasing the trend — a quieter, more considered version of a movement that's been loud and fast-moving almost everywhere else it's taken hold.
Reserved seating for the Sumida River Fireworks Festival, one of Tokyo's signature summer traditions, is showing up rampantly resold above face value, according to Livedoor News — the latest of Japan's beloved seasonal events to run into the same scalping problem that's already hit concerts and sports.
Kagoshima City and All Nippon Airways are running a trial-migration program that lets city dwellers spend several days actually living on Sakurajima, the active volcanic island a short ferry ride from downtown, according to SoraNews24. Depending on which of four programs participants pick, the days can include mandarin and radish harvesting, cycling the island's roads, freediving, digging your own footbath in the volcanic sand, or even a crash course in running a guest house for anyone seriously considering the move — all while sharing the island with a volcano the program itself describes as "almost constantly smoking." ANA throws in flight credits to sweeten the deal. It's rural tourism with genuinely raised stakes: the pitch isn't just quiet countryside, it's quiet countryside next to an active vent that could, at any moment, remind you it's still a volcano.
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