Wall Street closed higher on Thursday, with falling oil prices and retreating Treasury yields easing inflation concerns a day after the Federal Reserve's rate increase, according to Yahoo Finance. The 10-year Treasury yield fell 7.6 basis points to 4.93%, snapping an eight-day rising streak, and semiconductor ETFs led the advance, with the VanEck and iShares semiconductor funds adding more than 2.8% and 3.5% respectively on strength in Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Micron. That is the bid Tokyo imported at Friday's open, and it is why Advantest and Tokyo Electron were able to lead a Japanese session that was otherwise about domestic rates.

Brent crude declined as much as 1.5% to $103.29 a barrel in the Investing.com report of Friday's Asian session, its third consecutive daily fall, with European energy shares shedding 0.5% on the move, per Investing.com. Reports of Saudi Arabia offering additional crude via Oman and a smaller-than-expected US inventory draw were cited as drivers. For Japan, cheaper crude is a direct improvement in import costs and the trade balance at a moment when the yen is moving the other way — the two forces partly cancel, which is the most useful thing that happened to Japanese importers this week.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it struck a Togolese-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, claiming the vessel had attempted an illegal passage and came to a halt after a fire broke out on board, while Reuters reported that China is being pressed to help rein in Houthi forces following a Saudi appeal, according to ZeroHedge, which also carried President Trump's remark to Axios that "do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not? It's a big decision." Japan's stake in this is being negotiated directly: Prime Minister Takaichi is expected to raise free and safe transit through the strait when she meets Trump at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, per diplomatic sources cited by Japan Today.

The pan-European STOXX 600 eased 0.2% to 641.57 points on Friday yet remained set for its first weekly gain in three, in a week crowded with rate decisions, Investing.com reported. Telecoms led the decline, falling 1.8% with Deutsche Telekom down 3.1%, while technology rose 0.9% on gains in Aixtron and Infineon. Nestlé slipped 1.2% after Russia seized its local assets. Euro zone government bond yields, meanwhile, headed for a weekly decline as the post-Fed rally soothed duration fears, per Investing.com. A chip-led Europe and a bond market calming down is the same tape Tokyo traded — the global rates scare of the past fortnight is unwinding in every time zone at once.

Barclays expects Bank of England rate increases in November and February on inflation risks, Investing.com reported, and UK retail sales bounced back across Great Britain, according to The Guardian. With the Fed having moved this week and the BOJ moving today, a Bank of England that follows in November would leave the major central banks tightening in near-unison for the first time in this cycle. That is the regime Japanese investors have not operated in for a generation, and it removes the assumption that has underwritten every yen-funded carry trade: that somewhere in the G7, money stays cheap.

South Korean equities rallied, with the KOSPI up 2.7% and SK Hynix closing 6.4% higher after reports that its Solidigm unit is weighing a NAND memory plant in the United States, with upstate New York the leading candidate, Investing.com reported, citing three people familiar with the matter. The company said only that Solidigm "is reviewing various options to strengthen its business competitiveness, but no specific plans have been confirmed at this time." The read-through for Tokyo is the reshoring premium: a Korean memory maker being rewarded 6% for the idea of moving capacity out of China and into the US is the market pricing supply-chain location as a valuation input, and Japan's equipment makers sell into whichever geography wins.

State-owned China Rare Earth Group is in talks to acquire Shenghe Resources, a deal that would hand it Shenghe's 3% stake in the American producer MP Materials — a company whose largest shareholder is now the US Department of Defense — with talks underway since earlier this year, Reuters reported exclusively via Investing.com. All three parties declined to comment. The transaction would eliminate one of China's last major privately-held rare-earth miners and refiners. Japan learned what this leverage feels like in 2010 and has spent fifteen years and a great deal of public money building alternatives; a more consolidated Chinese supply chain makes that spending look less like insurance and more like a permanent operating cost for Japanese motor, magnet and defence manufacturing.

Bitcoin traded around $77,216, up more than 1%, advancing alongside stocks and bonds as falling oil eased inflation concerns, while ether ETFs posted roughly $39 million of net outflows on Thursday — a third consecutive day — and XRP funds shed about $5 million, CoinDesk reported on Friday. Crypto taking two central bank hikes inside 48 hours without breaking is the notable part; the ETF outflows say the flows underneath are not confirming the price.

SK Hynix's Solidigm unit is weighing a NAND flash plant in the United States, with upstate New York the leading candidate, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions cited by Investing.com. No agreement has been reached and key details remain under discussion; SK Hynix said only that various options are under review. The point of the exercise is Dalian — Solidigm's sole NAND facility sits in China, which is an uncomfortable place to keep your only fab when Washington is applying reshoring pressure and tariffs are a live instrument. Higher US production costs are the obvious obstacle. For Japan, a new greenfield NAND fab anywhere is an order book: Tokyo Electron, Screen, Disco and Advantest sell the tools that fill it, which is part of why Tokyo's equipment names led Friday's rally.

Security researchers at Hacktron chained a heap buffer overflow in the libheif image library with an OpenAI single sign-on misconfiguration to achieve remote code execution on OpenAI's community forum and escalate to employee account access, ultimately demonstrating the reach by opening a pull request in OpenAI's internal monorepo, the firm detailed in its own writeup. Exploit development was done with Claude Opus 4.8 and then Claude Opus 5, which ported the exploit to x86-64 with ASLR enabled. OpenAI fixed the issue 14 hours after the report and paid a $6,500 bounty in September. The researchers' conclusion is the transferable part: "security assumptions must catch up with attacker capabilities. A realistic threat model should take into account the economics of exploitation today." Memory-safety bugs in decades-old media libraries were survivable when exploiting them took a specialist weeks. That assumption is the thing that just changed.

Waymo said Singapore will be its next international market, working with the Ministry of Transport, the Land Transport Authority and other agencies, beginning with manually driven mapping and validation, targeting approval for autonomous driving in 2027 and commercial service in 2028, per the company. The same announcement notes the Waymo Driver is already gathering autonomous experience in London and Tokyo. That Tokyo programme got its date earlier this week: Waymo, taxi-app operator GO and Nihon Kotsu are targeting Japan's first fully autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027, scaling to about 100 Jaguar I-PACE vehicles across key neighbourhoods subject to approvals, Waymo said. Japan's taxi sector has a driver shortage and an ageing workforce, and it is about to find out whether the regulatory bottleneck or the technology one binds first.

PrismML released Bonsai 2 27B, compressing Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B model to 5.9 GB — a nine-to-tenfold reduction — while retaining 98% of the original's benchmark scores, up from 95% parity in its first release in March, TechCrunch reported. The technique is ternary weight compression: each weight drops from 16 bits to one of three values. "There is more room to compress larger models without losing intelligence," chief executive Babak Hassibi said. "For larger models, it's easier to get to 100%." The startup has raised $22.25 million from Khosla Ventures, Cerberus Capital and Caltech, and its models have been downloaded more than 13.6 million times. If reasoning-grade models run locally, the economics of the inference build-out change — and so does the case for some of the datacentre capacity currently being financed on twenty-year leases.

Micron Technology is scheduled to report after the US close on September 30 — roughly 05:00 JST on October 1 — a date MarketChameleon lists as confirmed. That timing matters more than usual for Tokyo. Japan's equipment complex — Advantest, Tokyo Electron, Disco, Screen, Lasertec — trades as a derivative of memory capital expenditure, and it led Friday's Nikkei rally on nothing more than Thursday's semiconductor bid in New York. Tokyo will have reopened by then, but only just, which means Japanese investors go into a six-day closure holding a theme whose next hard evidence lands only after they get back.

SB Energy, SoftBank's US data-centre and power developer, is seeking a valuation of roughly $50 billion in an IPO expected to raise $5 billion to $7 billion, and the delay to OpenAI's own public listing is adding pressure to that deal, Seeking Alpha via TradingView reported. SB Energy has not brought a single data centre online, carries a $439 billion contract backlog tied largely to 8.8 gigawatts of leased capacity, and stated in its prospectus that its near-term financial health depends substantially on OpenAI. Nvidia has provided a $105 billion guarantee for the first phase of the Ohio build. Strip away the scale and the structure is one customer, one guarantor and one unlisted counterparty whose own IPO slipped — and SoftBank Group is the entity carrying the timing risk.

Japan counted 107,677 centenarians this year, up 7,914 on twelve months ago and crossing 100,000 for the first time, with nearly 88% of them women, according to health ministry figures reported by NBC News. The numbers are released each year ahead of Respect for the Aged Day, which falls on Monday, when centenarians receive a silver sake cup and a letter from the prime minister. The trend line is the astonishing bit: there were 153 people aged 100 or over when the survey began in 1963, a thousand by 1981, ten thousand by 1998. Whatever else that curve represents, a hundred thousand people have now each been posted a cup.

The Tokyo International Film Festival unveiled a Gala selection headlined by Fan Bingbing in Wayne Wang's "Diary of a Mad Old Man," Pedro Pascal in Tony Gilroy's "Behemoth!," John Malkovich in Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine" and Javier Bardem in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's "The Beloved," Variety reported. The 12-title Animation Section includes three Japanese features chosen under the theme "Women Directors: Diverse Visions." Cate Blanchett will attend for a post-screening Q&A alongside directors Mohammad Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat, The Hollywood Reporter noted. The 39th edition runs October 26 to November 4.

Starbucks Japan launched Mitsuimo Milk, a seasonal drink built around the flavour of roasted Japanese sweet potato, SoraNews24 reported. Elsewhere the season is announced by pumpkin spice; in Japan it is announced by yakiimo, the stone-roasted sweet potato sold from small trucks whose recorded call is one of the genuinely reliable signals that the year has turned. Turning that into a cup is less a flavour decision than a piece of calendar-keeping.

Yamanashi Prefecture is ending complimentary helicopter rescue for hikers who go up Mount Fuji outside the official climbing season, SoraNews24 reported. Fuji's official season is short and the mountain in the off-months is a genuinely serious proposition that a striking number of visitors attempt in trainers. Charging for the rescue is the mildest available lever — a nudge rather than a ban — and it belongs to the same family of measures, alongside entry fees and gate hours, that Japan has been quietly assembling as inbound tourism outgrows the infrastructure that greets it.

Netflix and Sega announced a multi-title collaboration that includes a Crazy Taxi feature film, a live-action adaptation of Stranger Than Heaven, and a new Sonic the Hedgehog animated series aimed at younger children, Variety reported. The Crazy Taxi script goes to Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, who wrote the 2025 Naked Gun reboot, with Neal H. Moritz, Toby Ascher and Toru Nakahara producing. None has a release date. A 1999 arcade game about a driver hurling tourists across a fake San Francisco to a punk soundtrack is, on paper, ninety minutes of nothing — which has never once stopped this particular production lineage.

The Butt Detective television anime returns with new episodes starting October 3, Anime News Network reported. The premise, for the uninitiated, is a brilliant detective whose head is a bottom, solving crimes with impeccable manners. It began as a picture book series, has run on NHK for years, and remains one of the most reliably beloved children's properties in Japan — evidence that a national children's broadcaster will commit to a joke for a decade if the joke is good enough.

For the iPhone 18 launch, SoraNews24's reporter went to the Omotesando store where he had queued for the iPhone 4 in 2010 and found the line consisted of a single man with an orange mohawk standing in the rain, SoraNews24 reported. The reporter tried to talk him out of it, pointing out that Android handsets start around ¥22,000 against the iPhone 18's ¥219,800. The man heard him out and then explained the misunderstanding: "I don't care about the iPhone… I care about lining up!" The hundreds who once filled that pavement came for the phone and stopped coming when the phones stopped being surprising. He came for the queue, and the queue is still there.