The 10-year Treasury yield climbed to about 5.03% on Tuesday, its highest since 2007, as a global bond selloff spread and US stock futures slipped, according to Reuters via Investing.com, which also put Australia's 10-year at 5.41% and France's near an 18-year high. Futures markets priced a 92.1% probability that the Fed lifts its target range to 3.75%-4.00% at the meeting ending Wednesday, according to Investing.com. Morgan Stanley now forecasts two Fed hikes, this week and in December, citing a disinflation process that has been "slower and less convincing" than policymakers want, according to Investing.com. The decision lands around 3:00 JST Thursday; a Treasury market above 5% is already pulling Japan's long end higher before the BOJ even meets. On the corporate calendar, FedEx is scheduled to report on September 16.

Houthi forces struck a military airbase at Khamis Mushait in southern Saudi Arabia on Monday, days after an attack knocked the kingdom's East-West pipeline offline, and an Oman-hosted meeting of Iran and Gulf states on Strait of Hormuz shipping was postponed, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Washington declined a Saudi request for direct military intervention beyond intelligence support, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards said "the Strait of Hormuz is closed and still under our smart control," Reuters reported. Brent crude extended its gains in Asian trade on the supply threat, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Separately, the Pentagon's inspector general put the cost of the Iran war at $33.4 billion through June 29, including $22.3 billion in expended munitions, and found "strategic inventory shortfalls," according to CBS News. For Tokyo, higher crude keeps INPEX (1605) and the trading houses supported and adds to the import bill that feeds the BOJ's inflation problem.

China's industrial output rose 5.2% year on year in August, above the 4.8% forecast, but retail sales grew just 0.4% against expectations of 0.8%, and fixed-asset investment fell 7.2% in the first 8 months, according to Reuters via Yahoo Finance. CNBC said the retail miss and deepening investment slump pile pressure on Beijing. Strong factories and weak consumers is the mix that helps Japanese component and machinery suppliers into Chinese production lines while hurting consumer brands selling to Chinese households.

South Korea's Kospi fell 57.11 points, or 0.85%, to close at 6,627.26, according to Seoul Economic Daily. Hong Kong's Hang Seng was down 0.9% and the CSI 300 had lost 0.6% by midday, with Samsung Electronics down 0.2% and SK Hynix down 0.4% at the time, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Hong Kong's supply pipeline keeps growing: Syngenta Group has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise about $5 billion, Bloomberg reported, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Korean memory's muted session, after Monday's heavy selling, matches Tokyo's inability to extend its chip rebound.

UK payrolls fell by 26,000 in August, unemployment held at 4.9%, and pay growth including bonuses slowed to 3.9%, according to Reuters via Investing.com, which reported ING expects a 6-3 vote to hold Bank Rate at 3.75% on Thursday. A BoE hold alongside Fed and BOJ hikes would leave Thursday and Friday pulling the pound and the yen in opposite policy directions, a cross-current for Japanese exporters with large UK sales.

Spot gold fell 0.2% to $4,290.39 an ounce in European morning trade, pressured by a firmer dollar and Treasury yields above 5% ahead of the Fed, according to Investing.com; OCBC still forecasts a recovery to $4,600 by December. When real yields rise this fast, even a war-driven oil shock is not enough to lift bullion, and Sumitomo Metal Mining (5713) is the Tokyo name most tied to that pull.

Bitcoin stood at $76,875 as of 17:30 JST, down from above $78,900 at dawn, ahead of a Senate procedural vote on the Clarity Act market-structure bill. Polymarket odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 fell to 16%, with Democratic senators including Mark Warner saying the Republican ethics offer was not "near enough," according to Cointelegraph. Seychelles-based exchange CoinEx said it will cease most services on September 29 after 9 years, citing a prolonged market downturn and rising compliance costs, according to The Block. For Tokyo, crypto sliding alongside the retreat in chip shares on Tuesday shows the risk-appetite hit reaching beyond AI hardware.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing was down 3.52% in Tuesday's Taipei trade, while Kioxia was up 2.3% and Murata Manufacturing up 3.2% in Tokyo at the time, according to Reuters via Investing.com, which said investors were "reassessing the sustainability of the AI investment boom." Advantest ended down 2.96% at ¥30,160 even as Taiyo Yuden gained 5.54%, per the Investing.com Tokyo close. The pattern after Monday's rout: investors sold the names most tied to leading-edge training compute — TSMC's advanced foundry and Advantest's AI-chip testers — and bought back the component makers whose parts go into every server and phone regardless of how fast frontier models advance.

President Trump phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while he was on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday, and on speaker said the people pushing to slow AI "could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax," according to TechCrunch. Huang replied, "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir." Trump added that "we have to do them prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry." The exchange puts the White House and the largest AI chip supplier squarely against the labs' pacing push, which supports the demand case for Tokyo's equipment makers even as the labs themselves slow some training runs.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman argued that any pause in AI development should apply to companies building the most powerful models, not to open-source or smaller projects, according to Bloomberg, and said OpenAI has already slowed some cutting-edge work over safety concerns, according to Business Insider. A slowdown limited to a handful of frontier labs narrows the part of chip demand at risk, but those same labs are the biggest buyers of leading-edge accelerators — the customers behind Advantest's testing boom.

The AI Evaluator Forum published AEF-1, a proposed baseline standard for independent third-party AI evaluations covering access, conflicts of interest, funding, recusal and transparency, according to Latent Space, which tied it to Anthropic's proposal to embed outside evaluators inside frontier labs. Separately, Google DeepMind research engineer Bilal Chughtai resigned, writing that "AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome," according to Reuters via Investing.com. Audit standards turn a voluntary pause into process, and process tends to stretch model release timelines rather than cancel hardware orders.

Unions representing more than 80% of Micron's roughly 15,000 Taiwan employees are demanding a permanent profit-sharing system worth 15% of global operating profit, and union chairman Jerry Lin said they will move toward a strike vote if there is no concrete proposal at talks on September 18 and 21, according to Reuters via Investing.com. Taiwan is Micron's largest manufacturing hub for DRAM and HBM, so any walkout would tighten memory supply further — a potential pricing tailwind for Kioxia and a supply risk for Japanese PC and server assemblers.

MediaTek unveiled the Dimensity 9600 Pro, made on TSMC's most advanced process, and said it is working with customers to optimize computing performance as a memory shortage drives up component costs, according to Nikkei Asia. When chip designers start engineering around memory scarcity, it confirms how tight the market is for Kioxia and for Japanese smartphone component suppliers such as Murata and Taiyo Yuden.

Netherlands-based inference chip startup Euclyd raised more than €200 million in a Series A co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital, Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries, with former ASML chief Peter Wennink as chairman, according to CNBC. Money flowing to inference chips fits Tuesday's market logic: running models is the part of AI demand least exposed to a frontier slowdown, and it still needs Japanese testing, packaging and materials suppliers.

Japan counted 107,677 people aged 100 or older as of September 1, the first time the figure has topped 100,000, and a record for the 56th straight year, according to Japan Today. Women make up 87.6% of the total. The oldest woman is Fuyo Kishimoto, 114, of Kyoto, and the oldest man is Hikaru Kato, 112, of Kumamoto. The count arrives ahead of Respect for the Aged Day on Monday, September 21.

Toronto Blue Jays rookie Kazuma Okamoto hit his 33rd home run of the season against the Detroit Tigers on Monday, the most in a season by a Japanese right-handed batter in the majors, according to NHK. He had already passed Eric Hinske's Blue Jays rookie record of 24 and joined Shohei Ohtani, Hideki Matsui, Seiya Suzuki and Munetaka Murakami as a Japanese-born player with a 30-homer season, according to Sports Illustrated.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's live-action film of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga Look Back won the UNIMED Award from the student jury at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, according to Anime News Network. The film, starring Aju Makita and Natsuki Deguchi as 2 young manga artists, opened in Japan on September 11. Kore-eda will also receive an honorary award from the Singapore Film Festival, according to Variety.

This summer's Crayon Shin-chan movie, Super Strange! My Yokai Monster Vacation, has earned more than ¥2.7 billion since opening July 31, making it the highest-grossing film in the series, according to Anime News Network. It beat the roughly ¥2.1 billion of last year's Scorching Kasukabe Dancers.

Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Steam Time Locomotive opens in Japan on March 5, 2027, with Nobita and friends time-traveling to 19th-century Victorian London, according to Anime News Network. The screenplay is by Makoto Ueda, writer of The Tatami Galaxy and Penguin Highway.

A tour of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge takes visitors on a 1-kilometer walk along a maintenance passage beneath the expressway, over grated floors with the sea below, then a 90-second elevator ride to the top of a main tower about 300 meters above the water, according to News On Japan. The tours run through November 29. From the roughly 140-square-meter tower top, the view takes in the Akashi Strait, Kobe and Awaji Island, and on a clear day Osaka, above cables each about 1.1 meters thick and packed with 36,830 steel wires.

The Zen and Ghibli exhibition opens October 3 at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, built around Toshio Suzuki's conversations with Zen monks and centered on Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, according to Time Out. Visitors who book through JR Central's EX service receive goshuin papers — the pages temples stamp to certify a visit — decorated with Ghibli-meets-Kyoto artwork, for use at 3 famous Kyoto temples, according to SoraNews24. The show runs until December 6, and the museum is billing it as Ghibli for grown-ups.