Tokyo has closed at its highest level since the start of July. The Nikkei 225 finished at 69,946.86, up 2.40%, after trading as high as 70,037 during the day and then slipping back under the round number before the bell. Two chip-equipment names supplied most of the move, the Bank of Japan's deputy governor spent the afternoon describing the AI rally as a monetary variable, and the Prime Minister opened a 69-day Diet session by promising the bond market she can be trusted.
TokyoToday
MON · OCT 5 · 5:58 PM JST
BY SAVVY GIANT · DAILY · TEXT · AUDIO · JST
Japan Markets
Seventy thousand was touched and not held, and two stocks did the work
The Nikkei's 2.40% advance to 69,946.86 was its highest close since 1 July, with the broader TOPIX also rising but trailing well behind, per the Tokyo market wrap carried by Rallies. Chip-equipment makers Advantest (6857) and Tokyo Electron (8035) rose 4.32% and 5.5% respectively. The index reached 70,037 intraday before fading, printing a doji — a candle that opens and closes in nearly the same place after a wide range — with the relative strength index in overbought territory, according to Investing.com's level check.
The gap between the two indices is the whole story. A price-weighted index up 2.40% while the market-cap-weighted one lags by roughly a percentage point means the advance is sitting in a handful of heavyweights rather than spreading. Mamoru Shimode, chief strategist at Resona Asset Management, told the same wrap that the AI rally would continue "but markets would be more selective." That is a polite way of saying the cohort doing the lifting is getting narrower, not wider — and 70,000 is now a level the market has reached and failed to close above.
The BOJ's number two has given the AI boom a monetary label: a demand shock that arrived early
Deputy Governor Shinichi Uchida told the ECONDAT 2026 Fall Meeting today that AI is already changing the variables a central bank uses to set policy, describing it as "a big positive demand shock" pushing up activity and prices before any of its supply-side productivity gains have landed, per ActionForex's account of the speech. His tentative assessment was that "the demand side has come first," leaving financial conditions "more accommodative on balance" — equity gains easing conditions on one side, heavy bond issuance by AI-related companies pushing long rates up on the other. He also raised the possibility that AI eventually moves Japan's neutral rate of interest, while stressing that "the scale, timing and direction of these forces are still uncertain," as The Japan Times reported.
Read that against the tape and it is a warning with a specific mechanism attached. Uchida's caveat was that conditions could reverse if corporate profits fail to justify current AI investment expectations. A deputy governor saying the equity rally has loosened policy for him is a deputy governor saying the rally is now an input into the rate path, not just a consequence of it. The policy rate is 1.25% after September's quarter-point increase, the highest since 1995, and the next meeting is 29-30 October.
Takaichi's first act in the new session was a pledge aimed at the bond market, not the voters
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called economic growth her top priority in her policy address to parliament today, delivered under her cabinet's slogan of "decision, challenge and action," per Jiji via Nippon.com. The headline measure is the contentious plan to cut the consumption tax on food from 8% to 1% for two years. The part written for professional investors came next: she said the government would comprehensively examine prices, tax revenues, interest rates and debt-servicing costs, properly control government bond issue amounts, and take "necessary measures" if unusual moves occur in markets, as Nikkei Asia set out. She declared the start of the first year of "responsible and proactive" public finances.
The two halves of that speech pull against each other, and everyone in the room knows it. A food-tax cut is a revenue reduction; a promise to control issuance is a revenue constraint. The reconciliation has to appear in a number, and the number has not been published. Until it is, the long end will price the spending and discount the pledge — which is exactly what has happened to the yield curve since her programme became policy rather than campaign material.
Tomorrow's 10-year auction is the first real marking of that promise
The Ministry of Finance brings ¥2.6 trillion of 10-year debt to auction tomorrow, with ¥600 billion of 30-year paper following on Thursday, per News On Japan's week-ahead. Japanese government bond yields sit at generational highs, and these two auctions are the market's first opportunity to answer this morning's speech with a bid rather than a comment.
The currency leg went quiet while this was happening. The dollar had a strong day almost everywhere — the euro fell to a 17-month low — and yet the yen barely moved, with USD/JPY finishing at 157.80, up 0.08%. That is its own piece of information. On a day when the dollar was bid against a G7 currency facing two elections and a bond selloff, the yen did not join the queue. The Ministry of Finance's zone of concern starts in the high 150s and sharpens at 160; today the pressure came from Europe's problems rather than Japan's, which buys Tokyo a little room it did not have last week.
The head of Japan's biggest trading house says the bull run needs companies to use their cash better
Katsuya Nakanishi, chief executive of Mitsubishi Corporation (8058), warned that as Japan leaves its ultra-low-rate era behind and bond yields climb to a 31-year high, Japanese companies must deploy cash more efficiently or the equity boom is at risk, per the Financial Times interview summarised here. He framed the shift as investors now facing "a choice between bonds and stocks," and added: "I believe that unless we pay closer attention to cash efficiency, we will face challenges." His own company has begun leaning harder on debt financing to lift capital efficiency while funding large investments, as Nikkei Asia has reported.
This is the most important thing a Japanese executive can say right now, and it is not a market call. The entire re-rating of corporate Japan since 2023 rested on one argument: that balance sheets stuffed with idle cash and cross-shareholdings would be forced to work harder. That argument was easy while the risk-free alternative paid nothing. With a positive and rising yield on government bonds, a company sitting on cash is no longer merely inefficient — it is visibly offering shareholders less than the sovereign does. The Nikkei doubled in eighteen months and set a record above 72,000 in June on the promise of that reform. Nakanishi is saying the promise now has a competitor.
Nippon Paint got the piece Akzo was willing to sell, and paid $1.35 billion for it
AkzoNobel agreed to sell its Southeast Asian decorative paints business to Nippon Paint Holdings (4612) for $1.35 billion, covering Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and Australia, with the Dutch company expecting roughly $1 billion in net cash proceeds after taxes and minority payments, per Investing.com. Nippon Paint is funding it with bank borrowings and cash rather than new shares. The Indonesian leg is expected to close in late 2026 and the rest around mid-2027. The shares rose about 1%, lagging a market up 2.40%, as Bloomberg reported.
The sequence matters more than the price. Nippon Paint offered €7.5 billion in July for Akzo's entire decorative paints division and was turned down. What it has bought instead is the regional perimeter — the markets where the seller is not the leader — ahead of Akzo's planned combination with Axalta. For a company built almost entirely by acquisition, financing a bolt-on in a region where it already has distribution with debt instead of equity is a disciplined answer to a refusal, and the muted share reaction says the market read it as sensible rather than exciting.
Daiwa's client data walked out through a vendor, not through Daiwa
Daiwa Securities Group (8601) said information on as many as 110,000 clients may have been stolen after the servers of an outside vendor, Scala Communications, were breached between the evening of 2 October and the morning of 3 October, per The Japan Times. The exposed records include names, email addresses and securities account numbers; up to 220,000 records in total were involved, of which roughly 110,000 carried personal information. Daiwa says none of its own systems were breached, the data cannot be used to access accounts or trade online, and no improper transactions have been detected. The shares fell, per Investing.com.
The specific combination leaked here is the problem. A name, an email address and a brokerage account number is a ready-made phishing kit aimed at people who already expect email from a broker — and it arrives in a market where Yamato Holdings and Sakura Internet have had their own vendor intrusions recently. Japanese financial regulation holds the licensed firm responsible for its outsourcing chain, so "our systems were not breached" is an accurate statement that settles nothing about the supervisory question.
The services economy cooled right at the quarter's end
Japan's final services purchasing managers' index for September came in at 51.3, down from August's five-month high of 52.5 and below the 51.6 flash estimate, while the composite output index slipped to 52.3 from 53.5, per Reuters via Investing.com. Annabel Fiddes, economics associate director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said the data "pointed to a softer expansion of Japan's service sector as the third quarter drew to a close," with earthquake disruption denting demand. Employment nonetheless expanded for a 13th consecutive month, at the fastest pace since February.
That last clause is the one the Bank of Japan reads twice. Activity decelerating while hiring accelerates is a labour-shortage signature, not a demand signature — firms short of staff keep recruiting through a soft patch because the constraint is supply. It also means the slowdown does not automatically argue against another rate increase, because the wage pressure that justifies one is coming from exactly this mismatch.
Japanese corporate presence in China has fallen to the lowest since anyone started counting
The number of Japanese companies operating in China dropped to 10,118 as of June 2026 — down 22% from June 2024 and roughly 30% below the 2012 peak, the lowest since Teikoku Databank began tracking it in 2010, per CNBC. A record 4,137 companies were recorded as withdrawn or whereabouts unknown across those two years, against just 1,221 entering — the fewest of any survey period. Shanghai lost 1,085 sites and Beijing is down to 555, about half its 2022 count.
Three pressures did this at once: a slowing Chinese economy, US tariffs reshaping where it makes sense to build, and the diplomatic freeze that followed the Prime Minister's remarks on Taiwan. The investment case cuts both ways for Tokyo-listed names. Less China exposure means less political risk in the earnings line, which is why some of this is a re-rating rather than a retreat. It also means giving up the volume base that justified a generation of Japanese capital expenditure, and nothing in Southeast Asia replaces it one-for-one.
A record number of century-old Japanese firms are going under, and one of them is taking itself private instead
Bankruptcies among Japanese companies more than a hundred years old reached 112 in the first eight months of 2026, a pace that would take the full year past 160 and beyond the record set in 2024, according to Teikoku Databank via CNBC. Japan holds roughly 33,000 of the world's 74,000 companies older than a century. The pressures are a shrinking domestic market, labour shortages, rising costs and the succession problem — the founder's great-grandchild who does not want the business.
The alternative route is in the same report. Kadoya Sesame Mills (2612), a sesame-oil maker founded in 1858 and listed since 2004, is going private through a tender offer backed by the private equity firm Integral. That is the trade now available to a profitable small-cap with a famous name and no obvious heir: the public market will not pay for patient capital, so patient capital buys it off the public market. Tokyo's listing reform succeeded in making boards care about valuation. One consequence is a steady migration of exactly these companies out of the index — and the next TSE closure, a three-calendar-day break for Sports Day from 10 to 12 October that costs one trading session before trading resumes on the 13th, is a short pause in a trend that is not pausing. Fast Retailing (9983) is scheduled to report on Thursday.
Global
The euro hit a 17-month low because Spain just called an election nobody had scheduled
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap general election for 29 November after parliament rejected his minority government's housing relief measures, per France 24. The euro fell to its weakest level against the dollar since May 2025 as the news landed on top of last week's French bond selloff, dropping as much as 0.8% on the session, according to Bloomberg. The yield gap between French bonds and German bunds had already widened to roughly 150 basis points on Friday, the widest since the sovereign debt crisis in 2011, per Reuters.
For Tokyo this registered as something specific: a broad dollar bid that the yen did not have to absorb. When the dollar strengthens because of US rates, the yen takes the hit. When it strengthens because Europe is the problem, the pressure diverts — and USD/JPY moved 0.08% on a day the euro moved more than 0.8%. Japanese institutions are also among the largest foreign holders of European sovereign debt, so a repricing of French and Spanish political risk shows up in Japanese insurance and bank portfolios before it shows up anywhere else in Asia.
A payrolls number that was too weak to ignore is what actually lifted Asia today
Asian equities rose broadly on Monday as soft US jobs data pushed traders to trim the odds of another Federal Reserve increase, with Japan the standout gainer, per Investing.com. The last completed Wall Street session, on 2 October, closed the S&P 500 at 7,722.72, up 0.73%, the Nasdaq Composite at 27,190.86, up 1.19%, and the Dow at 51,176.96, up 0.49%. The federal funds target sits at 3.75% to 4.00% after September's quarter-point increase, with the minutes of that meeting due Wednesday.
Two things are worth holding together. The mechanism that lifted Tokyo was a weakening American labour market, which is not a bullish fact about anything except the discount rate. And the long end did not cooperate: Treasury yields pushed higher even as hike odds fell, which is the bond market pricing fiscal supply rather than policy. CNBC's read is that surging yields do not yet signal a fiscal crisis, here — the operative word being yet. An equity rally powered by lower expected policy rates and accompanied by higher long rates is a rally with its own contradiction built in.
Saudi Arabia just cut what Asian refiners pay, which is the most concrete oil news of the day
Crude eased in Asian trade on Monday as Middle Eastern exports recovered and the G7's emergency stock release took effect, with Brent moving lower on the session, per Angel One's market note dated 5 October. Middle Eastern crude exports ran above pre-war levels on four days in the final week of September, according to Kpler data cited in the same note. The sharper detail: Saudi Aramco unexpectedly cut its November Arab Light official selling price for Asia by $3 a barrel, taking it to a $5 discount against the Oman-Dubai average.
An official selling price is not a futures quote — it is the invoice. Aramco setting Arab Light at a discount for November is a direct reduction in what Japanese, Korean and Indian refiners will actually pay, and the size of the cut says the kingdom is competing for Asian volume rather than rationing it. That is a real margin tailwind for Japan's refining complex and a disinflationary nudge to the import bill, independent of whatever the front-month contract does this week.
The relief is conditional, because Yemen just escalated
Yemen's government launched a full-scale offensive to retake all territory held by the Iran-backed Houthis, per Reuters via Investing.com, after the group struck Saudi Aramco facilities — an attack that briefly pushed crude higher before the export-recovery story took over, also per Investing.com.
The thing to watch is not the barrel count but the insurance market. Attacks on Saudi production infrastructure and a ground offensive on the southern flank of the Red Sea corridor are what move war-risk premiums for hulls transiting to Asia, and freight is the channel through which this reaches Japanese import costs faster than crude does.
Brazil is going to a runoff, and the real is a Japanese retail holding
Brazil's presidential election is headed to a second round on 25 October after Senator Flávio Bolsonaro beat expectations in Sunday's first round against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, per Reuters via Investing.com.
The Japan channel is the carry trade. Japanese retail investors are among the most persistent foreign buyers of high-yield emerging-market currency exposure through yen-funded products, and the real is a core position inside that complex. A three-week runoff window means the uncertainty does not clear in either direction — it just sits there, in a set of retail funds that mark daily.
Trump told Seoul to sign the Alaska LNG deal or pay more, which is a message Tokyo can also read
President Trump said South Korea would face higher charges if it does not commit to the $54 billion Alaska liquefied natural gas project, telling reporters: "If they don't want to do it, that's OK with me — I'll just charge them more," per CNBC. Korean officials have said their participation remains subject to a formal economic viability assessment, as The Korea Times reported.
Japan is in the same position with a weaker hand. It is one of the world's two largest importers of liquefied natural gas, its utilities sign some of the longest contracts in the market, and it has already been courted for Alaska LNG on strategic grounds. The Economist's framing of an "almighty LNG crunch" ahead, here, is what makes this more than a tariff story: if gas supply is genuinely tightening into the back half of the decade, a buyer being asked to pre-commit capital for volume is being asked a real question, and the answer sits on the P&L of every Japanese power generator.
Hong Kong traded thinly with the mainland and Seoul both shut
Hong Kong stocks edged lower in light trading on Monday as selling in property developers and financial heavyweights outweighed gains in technology, with real estate off 0.9% and a finance subindex down 0.7% while Hang Seng Tech rose, per Reuters via Business Recorder. Mainland Chinese markets are closed through 7 October for the National Day holiday, and South Korean markets were shut today for the National Foundation Day substitute holiday.
That left Tokyo running without its two closest regional reference points. For a Japanese market whose leadership is semiconductors, the missing print is the Korean memory complex — the cleanest same-day read on the cycle Japan's tool makers are paid by. Today's chip rally in Tokyo was therefore priced off Wall Street's Friday and nothing nearer.
Pension funds with $100 billion-plus are quietly stepping out of the trade Tokyo is long
A Financial Times survey found several of the world's largest pension funds now hold less in US equities than global benchmark weights, including the $260 billion Australian Retirement Trust, Canada's $388 billion La Caisse and the UK's £45 billion People's Pension, with concentration in a handful of AI names the stated reason, per the FT. Goldman Sachs estimated US pension funds would sell around $33 billion of equities into the end of September, a volume in the 98th percentile since 2000, as summarised here.
The uncomfortable part for Tokyo is that the Nikkei is now a version of the same position. An index where two chip-equipment names can deliver most of a 2.40% session has the concentration characteristic these allocators say they are reducing. Japan has been a beneficiary of the diversification trade all year — the money leaving US mega-cap tech has to go somewhere, and Japanese quality has been a favoured destination. The risk is that the thing being diversified away from and the thing being diversified into are both the AI capital-expenditure cycle wearing different flags.
Bitcoin held above $86,000
Bitcoin was $86,469, up 0.56%, as of this evening Japan time. CoinDesk argues the asset is approaching a technical signal it has not generated in more than a year, here. Separately, a joint venture between OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a tokenised trading platform, per Investing.com.
The second item is the one with structural weight. An exchange group that owns the New York Stock Exchange putting its name to tokenised equity infrastructure moves the conversation from crypto-native venues to the market plumbing itself. Japan's Financial Services Agency is running its own review of where digital assets sit in the regulatory perimeter, and tokenised securities — as opposed to tokens — are the part where Japanese rules are least settled.
Tech
Qualcomm is paying Huawei, which reverses twenty-five years of the relationship
Qualcomm and Huawei announced a multi-year cross-licensing agreement today covering 5G, computing, artificial intelligence and networking, under which Qualcomm will also buy selected US patents from Huawei, per Nikkei Asia. It is the first time Qualcomm becomes the net payer — Huawei first licensed Qualcomm's patents in 2001 — and Huawei said the deal would push the total value of its licensing agreements past $6.9 billion once complete, per the joint announcement carried by Yahoo Finance. The agreement requires regulatory approval and neither company disclosed terms or a timetable.
Four years of export controls were supposed to isolate Huawei from the Western semiconductor industry. What happened instead is that Huawei kept filing, and the patent estate it built while cut off from the market is now valuable enough that the largest US wireless licensor is buying access to it. For Japan's component and equipment makers this is a useful read on where the leverage actually sits in the stack: the chokepoints are lithography, materials and test — physical things Japan and the Netherlands hold — but the recurring revenue is increasingly in the claims, and Japanese firms have been historically poor at monetising theirs.
Two stocks moved an index, and that is now the central question about Japanese technology
Advantest (6857) rose 4.32% and Tokyo Electron (8035) 5.5% in today's session as the Nikkei closed at its highest since 1 July, per the Tokyo wrap. The pattern is not new. In last Thursday's 3.30% session, three semiconductor names — Advantest, Tokyo Electron and Kioxia Holdings (285A) — accounted for more than half of the index's 2,203-point gain on their own, per BigGo Finance's breakdown.
This is a mechanical feature of a price-weighted index, but the concentration is real regardless of the arithmetic. A market where the same four or five tickers decide the direction has effectively become a single expression of one thesis: that hyperscaler capital expenditure keeps compounding. Japanese tool makers are genuinely well placed in that cycle — their order books run longer than any chip price — and that is exactly why the backlog will show the turn before anyone's revenue line does. The question for the next quarter is not whether the thesis is right but whether anything else in Tokyo starts participating.
The SEC is being asked to approve tokenised shares in 63 NYSE-listed companies
OKXICE, a joint venture between the crypto exchange OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange, is seeking Securities and Exchange Commission approval to offer tokenised shares of 63 NYSE-listed firms, leveraging new US rules on tokenised stocks, per Bloomberg via Techmeme.
Tokenised equity has been pitched for a decade by firms with no connection to the companies being tokenised. This one is different because ICE owns the venue where those 63 names actually trade. If it clears, the settlement layer of US equity ownership gets an alternative — and every exchange in the world, Tokyo included, inherits a question about whether its own order book is the only place its listings can change hands.
Google stopped paying for open-source bug reports because AI buried the queue
Google froze its open-source bug bounty programme after a "significant rise" in AI-generated submissions, per TechCrunch.
This is the first clean example of a specific economic mechanism breaking under generative abundance. A bounty works because producing a credible vulnerability report is expensive and verifying one is cheap. Invert that — reports become nearly free to generate, verification stays expensive and human — and the programme stops being an incentive and becomes a denial-of-service attack with a payout attached. Every market built on costly signalling has the same exposure, including the sell-side research and credit-rating functions that underpin a great deal of Japanese institutional process.
Meta's assistant is keeping a file on everyone you know
Extracted system prompts show Meta's Muse assistant compiles "a page for every person in the user's life," holding facts, history and suggestions for improving relationships, per Wired via Techmeme.
The privacy question is the obvious one and not the interesting one. The interesting one is that these pages describe people who never agreed to anything — the third parties in someone else's assistant. Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information is built around the data subject's consent, and a dossier assembled about a non-user by a non-Japanese platform is a category the statute handles badly. It is also the exact shape of problem that produced Japan's unusually strict rules on telecoms metadata, so there is precedent for a sharp domestic response.
Western open-weight models are shipping this month, with China as the explicit benchmark
Several Western open-weight models are set to launch in October, including Reflection AI's first model, pitched to rival the leading Chinese open-weight systems, per Axios via Techmeme. Separately, Australian AI data-centre operator Firmus plans to allocate about half its initial public offering to existing holders because demand far exceeds the offer size, in one of the country's largest listings, per Bloomberg via Techmeme.
Open weights are where Japan's AI strategy actually lives. Sovereign-model projects at the national research institutes and the telecom groups depend on being able to start from strong open bases rather than training frontier models from scratch, and for the last two years the best available options have mostly been Chinese — an awkward dependency for a country aligning its technology policy with Washington. A credible Western open-weight tier changes the inputs available to every Japanese model team this quarter.
Lifestyle
Two life-size racehorse girls turned up at Longchamp, and the sponsorship behind them is a first
Life-size figures of Orfevre and Gold Ship — characters from the horse-girl franchise Uma Musume — were installed at ParisLongchamp for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe weekend, after developer Cygames signed a sponsorship agreement with France Galop to become the first Japanese company to serve as a Premium Partner of the race, per Sankaku Complex. The deal put Japanese branding on race programmes and trackside signage.
The choice of the two characters is the quietly perfect part. Both are based on real horses that ran the Arc and did not win it: Orfevre finished second in 2012 and again in 2013, about as close as Japan has come, and Gold Ship ran in 2014. A country that has spent four decades failing to win this race sent, as its first corporate ambassadors to it, statues of two of the near-misses.
Hanshin's second parade in a row gets Osaka's grandest avenue
The Osaka prefectural government announced that the Hanshin Tigers' championship parade — the second in consecutive years — will be held on 23 November along Midosuji, the broad tree-lined boulevard that runs through the centre of the city, per Asahi Shimbun.
Midosuji is reserved for things Osaka considers civic rather than commercial, and closing it is a decision taken at prefectural level. The last time the Tigers were given it, the parades drew about a million people across the Osaka and Kobe routes. There is no other franchise in Japan whose success rearranges a major city's traffic plan by consensus.
Ghibli is going to let 256 people sew their own Totoro
A make-your-own-Totoro plushie workshop is coming to the Chikyu Shimin Koryu Center, inside the Aichi park that houses Ghibli Park, across eight sessions on 21 and 22 November, per SoraNews24. Over 70 minutes, participants aged six and up attach the eyes, add a leaf accessory, stuff the body with cotton and sew up the back seam. Tickets are ¥7,000, allocated by online lottery with applications open 7 to 12 October and winners announced on the 16th.
Capacity is 32 per session, which is 256 Totoros in total for a country of 120 million people and a franchise with global reach. The workshop is a travelling version of events the teddy bear museums in Shizuoka and Tochigi run year-round — where, for the record, you can also make a Catbus.
Chiikawa out-earned a political thriller in Korea without out-selling it
The Chiikawa film generated the top weekend gross at the Korean box office while the domestic political thriller The Assassin(s) held the admissions lead, per Variety.
That split — more money, fewer tickets — is the signature of a family title playing in premium formats and larger group bookings. It is also another data point in the strangest soft-power story of the decade: a deliberately crude, barely-animated property about a small round creature and its friends, which has spent two years converting into the highest-margin merchandise franchise in Asia.
Lego is doing Ocarina of Time, and it brought the horse
Nintendo and Lego announced an official set based on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, featuring Link and his horse Epona, per Polygon. The announcement arrives alongside news that the Ocarina of Time remake is getting official instrument support, letting players use a real-world input to play the game's songs, also per Polygon.
Nintendo spent most of its history refusing to license its characters to anyone. The partnership that broke that policy has now reached the single most sentimentally defended game in the catalogue — and the remake is adding a feature whose entire purpose is to make a plastic ocarina a reasonable purchase.
One of the best manga of the decade ends in two chapters
Keigo Shinzō's Hirayasumi will finish with its final chapter on 19 October, after five and a half years in Shogakukan's Weekly Big Comic Spirits, per Anime News Network. The series — a quiet story about a 29-year-old with no particular plan, living in an old house he inherited from a neighbour — has passed 1.1 million copies in circulation, drew a live-action NHK series in November 2025, and has a television anime due on NHK General in January 2027.
It is ending on schedule, at ten volumes, with the adaptations arriving after the manga is complete rather than during it. In an industry that keeps successful series running until the author's health gives out, finishing a hit on purpose is the harder thing.
And finally: a Yokohama cafe has worked out how to serve you a tea with its own weather
At Chazhong, which opened in Yokohama's Chinatown this summer, every tea arrives with a miniature teapot balanced on top of the cup, and the little pot is doing something, per SoraNews24's visit. Inside it is water and a piece of dry ice. The result is a thin ribbon of white smoke curling out of a teapot the size of a thumb, drifting across the table for about two minutes.
Two minutes is roughly how long it takes to photograph a drink and send the picture to somebody. The effect adds nothing to the tea; it has made the cafe one of the most photographed rooms in Chinatown. Somebody looked at a cup of tea, decided what it lacked was a tiny chimney, and was right.
Scraps
Markets & Macro
Trend-following strategies were positioned for the move in global long rates.
The yen was the regional exception, barely moving against a broadly bid dollar.
A hawkish turn at the Reserve Bank would complete the Asian policy reversal.
Moody's puts a date on the demographic arithmetic Japan has been living inside for two decades.
Hong Kong's technicals stretched to the downside while the mainland stayed shut.
Another Asian exchange competing for the primary market Tokyo keeps losing.
World & Energy
Volumes have recovered faster than the risk premium has fallen.
The same payrolls print that lifted Tokyo lifted bullion.
Britain joins the tariff wall Japanese carmakers have been quietly grateful for.
A European carrier putting a number on AI headcount reduction, which NTT and KDDI have not.
Tech & Culture
The image-model pioneer re-emerges aimed at music professionals, backed by the major labels.
The hardware boss is now in the design studio several times a week.
A re-release reclaims the record, which is now mostly a measure of who reissues more aggressively.
The Pokémon Center's seasonal drop is one of the most reliable licensing calendars in Japanese retail.
The historical crime series set in 1930s Manchuria gets a screen adaptation.
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Published Monday, October 5, 2026 · 5:58 PM JST — website & podcasts in sync