Tokyo closed higher for a third straight session, but the index and the market underneath it told different stories: one semiconductor name supplied most of the lift while more Nikkei members fell than rose. The largest TOPIX rebalance on record forced tens of billions of dollars through the closing auction, and the Bank of Japan decides tomorrow.
TokyoToday
THU · OCT 29 · 5:58 PM JST
BY SAVVY GIANT · DAILY · TEXT · AUDIO · JST
Japan Markets
The Nikkei took a third straight gain from a very small number of stocks
The Nikkei 225 closed Thursday at 64,659.47, up 1.10% from Wednesday's 63,954.19. That is three consecutive advancing sessions — Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — and just under 4% recovered from Monday's 62,189.65, which had been the weakest close since the end of July.
The breadth says something different from the headline. Reuters' session report counted 123 of the Nikkei's 225 members lower against 99 higher, with three unchanged, and put Advantest's contribution at 408 index points on its own, as carried by Business Recorder. An index that rises while a clear majority of its constituents fall is not a broad risk-on tape; it is a narrow one, and narrow tapes are the ones that reverse hardest when their single engine stalls.
The path was not smooth either. The Nikkei was choppy through the middle of the day and briefly wiped out its early gains before recovering later in the session, per Newsquawk's Asia wrap. Nomura Securities' Maki Sawada put the hesitation down to what is still unanswered: "Ahead of these events, the market is perhaps showing a bit of nervousness," she told Reuters, in the same session report, with hundreds of Japanese companies reporting across Thursday and Friday and the central bank still to speak.
Among the other large movers, Tokyo Electron (8035) eased 0.9% and SoftBank Group (9984) slipped 0.6%, per that report.
The biggest TOPIX rebalance ever ran through today's closing auction
A TOPIX constituent change announced by JPX on 7 October hit its index-fund trade date at Thursday 29 October's close, with the change taking effect 30 October, per the JPX notice.
The trade date is the one that moves prices, not the effective date. Index-tracking funds have no discretion: they must transact in the closing auction to be aligned with the benchmark when it changes on Friday. This one is unusually large. The rebalance was expected to trigger around US$60 billion of passive trading at Thursday's close, affecting more than 700 stocks through a combination of additions, deletions and free-float weight adjustments — the largest such reshuffle on record, per Newsquawk. Hedge funds had been positioning around the trade for weeks, as the Japan Times reported.
JPX published the constituent lists as notice attachments rather than inline text, so the added and removed names are not reproduced here. What matters for reading today's tape is the timing: a very large, price-insensitive flow landed in the final minutes of a session that had spent the middle of the day going sideways, and it landed the afternoon before a central bank decision — the point in the week when the discretionary liquidity that would normally absorb such a flow is thinnest.
Advantest raised its profit forecast by 14% and carried the index on its back
Advantest (6857) lifted its operating profit forecast for the year to March 2027 to ¥967 billion from ¥846 billion, with revenue guided to ¥1.863 trillion from ¥1.714 trillion and net profit to ¥741.5 billion from ¥660 billion. The implied operating margin rises to 51.9% from 49.4%, per Investing.com. First-half revenue for April–September rose 60.5% to ¥845.2 billion and first-half operating profit jumped 96.5% to ¥456.8 billion, a record half for the company.
The stock closed up 5.4% after being up as much as 9.1% intraday, per Reuters' session report.
A margin above 50% on a hardware business is the number to sit with. Advantest sells the testers that verify AI accelerators actually work before they ship, and it is pricing like a company that knows no one can route around it — the company sees the SoC tester market at about $11.5 billion in calendar 2026 as inference workloads expand, per Investing.com's write-up of the upgrade. That is also the concentration risk in the index: one name supplying 408 points of lift is one name whose disappointment would cost the same.
Hitachi lost a tenth of its value on a cost overrun it says will not repeat
Hitachi (6501) fell 10.5% to ¥5,030, the worst performer in the Nikkei 225, after second-quarter revenue rose 15% to a record ¥2.904 trillion while net profit attributable to shareholders dropped to ¥227.1 billion from ¥280.6 billion, per Investing.com.
The company attributed the profit decline to a one-time cost overrun on a social infrastructure project inside its Digital Systems & Services segment and said it should not recur. It also raised its full-year net profit forecast to ¥920 billion from ¥900 billion and lifted the interim dividend to ¥32 per share from a planned ¥28.
Read that combination carefully, because the market clearly did. Management raised the year, raised the dividend, and still lost a tenth of the equity in a session. That is what happens to a stock carrying several years of re-rating: when the premium is for execution quality, a self-inflicted project overrun is not a rounding error, it is evidence against the thesis. The guidance raise says the business is fine. The share price says the story had less slack in it than the business does.
Two more TSE names beat on revenue and got marked down on margin
Renesas Electronics (6723) reported third-quarter revenue of ¥435.2 billion, up 30.2% year on year, with a gross margin of 59.4% — both ahead of the company's own July forecast. The shares fell 7.81% to ¥2,858 as attention went to the guide rather than the quarter: fourth-quarter gross margin is pencilled at 58.0% and operating margin at 32.0%, with management attributing more than half the decline to product mix within digital power. Capital expenditure ran to ¥111.2 billion in the quarter, over a quarter of revenue, with roughly 80% going to capacity, per Investing.com.
Komatsu (6301) told a similar story in a different industry. First-half revenue rose 13.6% to ¥1,115.5 billion and net income rose 13.3% to ¥95.8 billion, while operating income slipped 1.2% to ¥135.1 billion and the operating margin came in at 12.1%. The full-year operating income forecast is ¥555.0 billion, down 2.2% on the prior year but revised ¥47.0 billion higher than the company's previous projection on improved tariff and geopolitical conditions, per GuruFocus.
The common thread is the one discipline that has governed this earnings season in Tokyo: revenue beats are assumed, and the argument is entirely about what the next margin looks like. A company that grows 30% and guides its gross margin down 1.4 points gets sold. A company that raises its full-year number by ¥47 billion but shows a flat-to-lower operating line gets a shrug. The tape is paying for profitability, not for scale.
Chubu Electric booked more than ¥370 billion against a reactor it can no longer restart
Chubu Electric Power (9502) is taking a special loss of more than ¥370 billion tied to the withdrawal of its safety-screening applications for the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Hamaoka plant in Shizuoka Prefecture, per NHK.
The withdrawal itself followed an independent committee's finding that seismic data submitted to the Nuclear Regulation Authority had been manipulated since around 2012 — the utility selected earthquake-motion data to set quake-resistance design standards while presenting the methodology as sound. According to the regulator it is the first time a screening application has been withdrawn over misconduct, as Nippon.com reported. The company announced senior leadership resignations in September.
The write-down is the moment the governance failure becomes a number. Hamaoka's restart was a real asset on the balance sheet — years of capital spending held at value on the premise that a regulator would eventually approve it. Falsified data did not just delay that approval, it removed the option, and ¥370 billion is the price of discovering that the cheapest thing a regulated utility owns is its credibility with the regulator.
ANA is buying the two airlines it has been propping up
ANA Holdings (9202) has signed a memorandum of understanding to make Regional Plus Wings — the holding company that owns AIRDO and Solaseed Air — a wholly owned subsidiary via a share exchange. ANA currently holds 15.32% of its common shares. The share-exchange agreement is expected to be concluded in late December, approved at an extraordinary shareholders' meeting in late February 2027, and take effect on 1 April 2027, per TRAICY.
For now the AIRDO and Solaseed brands stay, with the companies deepening cooperation in business planning, revenue management, procurement and facility maintenance. Over the medium term ANA says it will consider integration under the ANA brand, weighing each brand's accumulated value, its relationship with its local communities, and the effect on safe flight operations.
This is regional-airline consolidation arriving by the slow door. AIRDO flies Hokkaido and Solaseed flies Kyushu and Okinawa — two sub-scale carriers serving routes that are politically impossible to abandon and commercially difficult to run alone. Regional Plus Wings was created in 2022 precisely to share costs between them without merging them. Four years on, the answer is that shared costs were not enough, and the scale has to come from a parent.
Rengo is asking for 6% — which is the number the BOJ is actually watching
Rengo, Japan's largest labour federation, will urge affiliated unions to seek total pay increases of at least 5% and ideally around 6% in next spring's negotiations, including base-pay increases of at least 3% and ideally 4%. For unions with fewer than 300 members it will seek at least 6%, to narrow the gap between large and small employers, per the Japan Times. The federation also set a medium-term goal of lifting wages roughly 15% by 2030, so that a 35-year-old at a mid-sized company earns ¥360,000 a month, per Nippon.com. Rengo-affiliated workers secured an average 5.01% this year.
The wage round is the transmission mechanism the Bank of Japan has staked its entire normalisation case on. Its argument for moving away from emergency settings was never that prices rose — it was that pay would rise with them, making the inflation self-sustaining rather than imported. A federation asking for 6% after delivering 5.01% is the evidence for that case being produced on schedule, which is precisely why it matters more to the rate path than any single month of CPI.
A strong two-year auction kept JGBs calm into the decision
Japanese government bonds were broadly steady on Thursday, with a two-year auction drawing firmer demand than the previous month — a bid-to-cover ratio of 4.03 against 3.89. The two-year yield fell 0.5 basis points to 1.895%, reversing an earlier uptick after the auction, while the 10-year edged up 0.5 basis points to 2.83% and the five-year held at 2.265%, per Reuters, as carried by Business Today.
The market also drew support from US Treasuries, which firmed after the Federal Reserve held rates and gave little away about December. Mizuho Securities' Yuhi Kawano read the less-hawkish-than-expected outcome as reducing the need for the BOJ to move quickly, per that report. A Reuters poll of economists has the BOJ holding on Friday and delivering a 25-basis-point increase in December.
That is a bond market that has already bought the hawkish-hold scenario and is comfortable with it. The risk tomorrow is therefore asymmetric in an unusual direction: the surprise that costs money is not a hike, it is forecasts hawkish enough to pull December forward into something firmer than a poll consensus.
The BOJ decides tomorrow, and the forecasts matter more than the rate
The Bank of Japan concludes its two-day meeting on Friday 30 October, with the policy decision and the quarterly Outlook for Economic Activity and Prices both due. Consensus is a hold at 1.25%, after 50 basis points of increases already delivered this year. Core consumer price inflation rose to 2.1% in September with underlying inflation at 2.4%, per Investing.com's preview. ANZ's analysts are explicit on what follows: "We forecast the BoJ will raise interest rates 25bp in December and follow that with another 25bp hike in March next year," they wrote in that preview.
Friday stacks the inputs before the answer. Tokyo core CPI lands at 08:30 JST, alongside the unemployment rate; preliminary industrial production and retail sales follow at 08:50; the policy statement comes at 11:30. A soft Tokyo CPI print three hours ahead of the decision hands the doves the morning and makes the Outlook Report's inflation forecasts the only thing worth reading.
USD/JPY sat at 157.87, down 0.06% on the day — a currency that has not moved a fifth of a percent on the eve of a central bank decision. That stillness is a position, not an absence of one: it is a market that believes it knows the answer, which is exactly the configuration in which a hawkish Outlook Report has room to do damage. And Tokyo Electron (8035) reports tomorrow too, so Friday asks Tokyo to price a rate path and the biggest read on the chip capex cycle in the same morning.
Global
Samsung became the first tech company to clear ₩100 trillion in profit and fell anyway
Samsung Electronics posted third-quarter operating profit of ₩107.4 trillion, the first time any technology company has topped ₩100 trillion, on revenue of ₩195.3 trillion, up 14% sequentially, per Investing.com. HBM4 sales more than tripled quarter on quarter and accounted for 60% of total HBM sales, and the company said next year's supply is sold out. Full-year 2026 capital expenditure is guided to ₩84.4 trillion, up ₩31.7 trillion from 2025, as Nikkei Asia reported.
The shares fell as much as 6.6%, with a lack of a new shareholder-return plan, the higher capex and a chip-unit profit miss weighing on sentiment, per Bloomberg.
For Tokyo this was the session's actual weather. Japan's chip complex trades as a derivative of memory capex, and Samsung just confirmed the capex while failing to pay holders for it — which is why Tokyo's equipment names could take Advantest's upgrade and still watch the index give back its early gains in the middle of the day. More spending is good news for the people who sell the machines and bad news for the people who own the spender.
The KOSPI gave up 6,000 the day after it got it back
South Korea's KOSPI closed down 74.78 points, or 1.24%, at 5,937.66, surrendering the 6,000 level a day after reclaiming it. The index opened up 0.08% at 6,017.22 and was more than 1% higher early before Samsung's detailed results landed, after which it fell as much as 3.24% to 5,817.92. Concerns over the profitability of Samsung's next-generation HBM capacity and the pace of narrowing foundry losses drew concentrated selling from foreign and domestic institutions, per Financial News. SK Hynix rose more than 2%, a second consecutive gain, per SBS.
The split is the signal. The same session that punished the company with the shareholder-return problem rewarded the company without one, which tells you the selling was a judgement on capital allocation rather than a verdict on memory demand. Tokyo's chip names sit on the demand side of that distinction, which is the most useful thing a Japanese investor can take out of Seoul today.
Shell nearly doubled its profit on refining margins at a record
Shell nearly doubled quarterly profit year on year as refining margins soared to a record high, per CNBC.
The margin, not the crude price, is the part that reaches Japan. Japanese refiners earn on the spread between what they pay for a barrel and what they sell the products for, so a record global refining margin is a direct tailwind to ENEOS (5020) and Idemitsu Kosan (5019) in a quarter when the raw-material line has been expensive. It cuts the other way for everyone buying the refined product: a refining margin at a record is a fuel bill that stays high even if crude cooperates, which is an awkward input for a central bank trying to decide whether its inflation is domestic.
STMicro grew 18% and guided above the Street
STMicroelectronics reported third-quarter revenue up 17.9% year on year to $3.76 billion and operating income up 98% to $429 million against a $400.5 million estimate, and forecast $4.15 billion of fourth-quarter revenue against a $4.10 billion estimate, per Reuters.
This is the cleanest available cross-check on the one question hanging over Renesas today. Both companies sell into automotive and industrial rather than into AI accelerators, and the bear case on that end of the market has been that the cycle never really turned. A European peer doubling operating income and guiding above consensus says the recovery is real — which makes the Renesas sell-off a verdict on its own margin mix, not a referendum on the analog cycle.
Toyota's China problem reached a nine-year low
Toyota (7203) saw its six-month sales in China sink to a nine-year low as the market slumped, per Nikkei Asia.
China is no longer a growth market for Japanese automakers; it is a share-defence problem with a domestic cost base attached. The wider frame arrived the same day from Detroit, with Ford saying it will take on Chinese rivals by "going into their price point," also per Nikkei Asia. That is the strategic fork in front of every legacy manufacturer: meet the Chinese price and accept the margin, or concede the volume. Toyota's scale means it can survive either answer for longer than most, which is not the same as having chosen one.
Tokyo and Washington agreed to build missiles together, in a week North Korea fired a dozen
The United States and Japan have agreed to establish a missile-production facility, per Japan Today, as Tokyo expands its long-range arsenal, per the South China Morning Post. North Korea fired "around a dozen" ballistic missiles into the sea on Thursday, also per Japan Today.
Domestic assembly is the part with a share price attached. Japan's defence buildup has so far been mostly a procurement story — buying finished American systems — and a production facility converts it into an industrial one, with order books at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011), Kawasaki Heavy Industries (7012) and IHI (7013) on the other end. It also lands while the government is revising its three core security documents by year-end and weighing how to fund annual defence outlays expected to pass ¥10 trillion.
Bitcoin broke $80,000 on the same two things that moved Tokyo
Bitcoin traded at $80,034, down 1.43% on the day, having dipped below $80,000 as Samsung-led risk aversion in tech and a hawkish Fed weighed on crypto, per CoinDesk.
The attribution is the interesting part rather than the level. Crypto spent years being explained by its own internal narratives; here a named analyst chain traces a bitcoin move to a Korean memory maker's shareholder-return disclosure and a Federal Reserve hold. That is an asset trading as a pure duration-and-risk-appetite instrument, on exactly the two inputs that set Tokyo's tape today.
Tech
Google's search engine is growing more slowly, and Google says it is monetisation
Alphabet's Google search revenue rose 12% year on year to $63.25 billion in the third quarter, down from 14.5% growth a year earlier, with the company attributing the slowdown to "lower monetization" in AI Mode, per The Register. YouTube advertising rose 9% to $11.2 billion, below estimates, and total Google advertising rose 11% to $82.01 billion against an $83.6 billion estimate, per Variety. The company is now expanding ads in AI Mode into international markets as core search ad growth slows, per TechCrunch.
This is the most consequential sentence in big tech this quarter and it is buried in a segment note. Google has conceded, in its own words, that the AI interface it is moving users toward monetises worse than the one it is replacing — and its answer is to ship ads into that interface faster, internationally. Every company planning to put a chat layer in front of a revenue-generating product is now watching a controlled experiment in whether the ad load can be rebuilt before the old one erodes.
Microsoft disclosed how much of its cloud is one customer
Microsoft recorded $10 billion in revenue from OpenAI in its fiscal first quarter — nearly 11% of total quarterly revenue — and carries $7.2 billion in outstanding receivables from it, per a filing reported by TechCrunch. The company also disclosed Azure's revenue in dollars for the first time, at $33.2 billion, per TechCrunch. Elsewhere in the same results, Xbox hardware revenue fell 14%, Xbox content and services fell 2%, and Windows OEM and Devices revenue fell 22%, per The Verge.
Two disclosures, one message. A tenth of Microsoft's revenue now comes from a single counterparty it also funds, with $7.2 billion of it unpaid — that is customer concentration of a kind investors usually see in small suppliers, not the world's largest software company. Meanwhile the consumer franchises are shrinking at double digits. For Tokyo the relevant line is Azure's $33.2 billion: that figure is the demand curve sitting underneath Advantest (6857), Tokyo Electron (8035) and Ibiden (4062), and it is now reported in a form that can be tracked quarter to quarter.
Flash memory prices have quintupled, and the leverage moved to Kioxia
Surging demand from AI hyperscalers has quintupled flash memory prices and shifted market and negotiating power away from Apple toward suppliers such as Kioxia, per the Wall Street Journal.
A fivefold move in a component price is not a cycle, it is a regime change, and the detail that matters is who now sets terms. For two decades the consumer hardware giants dictated storage pricing because they bought in volumes no one could refuse; AI data centres have simply outbid them. Kioxia is the listed Japanese expression of that shift, and it is also why Toshiba's remaining holding in it keeps complicating the relisting case — the asset Toshiba has been selling down to fund its core business is the one with the pricing power.
Marvell is in advanced talks for an $83 billion optics maker
Marvell is in advanced talks to buy data-centre optics maker Lumentum, whose market value is around $83 billion, with a deal possibly announced as soon as next week, per Bloomberg. Lumentum shares rose as investors cheered the possibility, per MarketWatch.
Optics is where the AI buildout's next bottleneck has quietly relocated. Once you have the accelerators, the constraint becomes moving data between them fast enough, which makes transceivers and lasers the scarce input — and $83 billion is what scarcity costs. Japan has real exposure here through its photonics and optical-component suppliers, and a consolidating customer base on the US side changes the negotiating position of every one of them.
Korea put $280 million of state money into an AI chip challenger
Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI raised a $620 million Series D at a $2.9 billion valuation, up from $735 million in 2025, with South Korea's National Growth Fund contributing $280 million, per Bloomberg.
The structure is the story, not the sum. Korea is routing sovereign capital into a venture-stage challenger rather than a national champion consortium — close to the opposite of Japan's approach with Rapidus, which concentrates state money in a single large manufacturing bet. Both are attempts to buy a position in silicon that the market would not fund alone. Within a few years the two will constitute a fairly clean test of which structure converts public money into a product.
Enterprise software keeps beating the quarter and losing the stock
ServiceNow reported third-quarter subscription revenue up 21% to $3.99 billion while forecasting fourth-quarter current remaining performance obligations below estimates, per Bloomberg. The shares fell in extended trading as the miss clouded a raised AI outlook, per MarketWatch, and Fortinet also dropped after its results, per MarketWatch.
The pattern is now consistent enough to be a rule rather than a run of coincidences, and it is the same rule Tokyo applied to Renesas and Hitachi today: 21% growth with a soft forward-obligations number gets sold, because the backlog metric is the one that reveals whether AI enthusiasm has turned into signed commitments. Raised AI outlooks are free. Remaining performance obligations are not.
American students are walking away from computer science
US computer science enrolment fell more than 12% for undergraduates and more than 10% for graduate students this autumn, as AI reduces entry-level coding jobs, according to National Student Clearinghouse data, per Bloomberg.
Enrolment is a forward indicator with a four-year lag built in, which makes this the first hard measurement of students pricing AI into a career decision — and the cohort being discouraged is the one that would reach the labour market in 2030. Japan is running the opposite constraint: a structural engineer shortage that its own demographics guarantee, which is precisely why Japanese firms have spent this year competing for overseas software talent. A shrinking American pipeline makes that competition more expensive, not less.
Lifestyle
Shibuya has a slogan, 185 guards and 62 shops asked not to sell you a drink
Shibuya Ward is running Halloween under the banner "Goodbye Bad Halloween", with extra measures from 30 October to 1 November, roughly 185 security guards in total, the Hachikō statue fenced off and police traffic controls in place. From 6 p.m. on Saturday 31 October to 5 a.m. the next morning, 62 alcohol retailers near the no-drinking zone have been asked to voluntarily stop selling. Street drinking around Shibuya Station has been banned from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. year-round since October 2024, and littering carries a ¥2,000 fine, per the South China Morning Post.
What makes this more interesting than a crowd-control notice is that Shibuya is deliberately un-inventing a festival it never asked for. Halloween arrived in the ward as an unplanned side effect of being the most photographed intersection on earth, and the ward's response has been to reclaim the space with fences, slogans and voluntary retailer agreements rather than bans. The costumes have mostly migrated to Kawasaki, Ikebukuro and the theme parks — which is, by Shibuya's lights, a success.
Winter arrived in Japan before November did
Snow blanketed Hokkaido and northern Honshu this week, with the Japan Meteorological Agency confirming the season's first snow cover on peaks including Mount Iwate, Mount Gassan, Mount Zao, Mount Hakusan and Mount Tateyama. On 28 October, Sounkyo recorded 18 centimetres, Sukayu in Aomori 19 centimetres, and Wassamu 12 centimetres — a record October accumulation there. Yabukawa in Morioka fell to minus 0.9°C, and Morioka city managed only a 9.3°C daytime high. The Bandai-Azuma Skyline in Fukushima closed for snow and ice, and a second system was expected 31 October to 1 November, per News On Japan.
The charming detail is the overlap. Autumn-foliage season and first snowfall are not supposed to be the same week, and visitors who drove up the Bandai-Azuma Skyline for maple leaves found a road closed for ice instead. Japan's tourist calendar is unusually precise about when each landscape is supposed to look like itself, and this year the mountains got ahead of the schedule.
Cate Blanchett accepted a Japanese arts prize with a warning about certainty
Cate Blanchett warned against "unthinking certainty" as she accepted Japan's Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The Praemium Imperiale is one of the quieter pieces of Japanese cultural statecraft — an arts prize awarded since 1989 across painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theatre/film, with a reach that rarely makes the news outside the week it is handed out. Giving it to an actor who used the podium to argue against conviction rather than for her own craft is a nicely Japanese outcome: the ceremony is formal, and the speech was not.
Japan's IP market is going back to Cannes
The Japan IP Market will return to Cannes in 2027 as its partnership with Tokyo continues, per Variety.
This is the commercial plumbing under the anime boom, and it is worth understanding what is actually being sold. Not finished films — rights: the licence to adapt a manga, to co-produce a series, to build a game from a character. Japan spent decades letting foreign studios discover its catalogue by accident and is now marketing it deliberately at the industry's biggest rights bazaar, which is roughly the difference between having a hit and having an export business.
Meiji is selling ¥36,300 earphones shaped like chocolate mushrooms
A second-generation set of wireless earbuds designed to look like Kinoko no Yama — Meiji's chocolate-topped mushroom biscuits — launches on the crowdfunding platform Makuake on 1 November. The 2026 model adds upgraded audio tuning, gold-plated touch sensors and built-in AI translation across 144 languages and dialects. The first 1,000 pairs go for ¥29,800 in the opening 24 hours, rising through ¥34,800 to a regular price of ¥36,300, with made-to-order units available until 13 December. The case mirrors the original snack box, complete with a pop-up tray, per SoraNews24.
The product began as a visual joke on social media by Kagomedia before Meiji agreed to make it real. The first campaign sold 3,500 units in ten minutes and finished at 9,836% of a ¥1 million goal — which is how a gag about putting chocolate in your ears became a ¥36,300 consumer electronics product with a translation engine in it.
Taito is reopening the arcade on Switch again
Taito Milestones 5 has been announced for Switch, bundling another set of titles from the arcade publisher's catalogue, per Nintendo Life.
Five volumes in, the Milestones series has quietly become one of the better preservation projects in games. Taito's catalogue runs from Space Invaders through decades of cabinets that existed in Japanese arcades and almost nowhere else, and most of them have no legal home on any modern hardware. Each volume is a few more machines rescued from the specific oblivion that waits for software whose original hardware has rusted.
And finally: Gunma is putting Pokémon on its drain covers, and it is a tourism strategy
Five new Pokémon manhole covers will be installed across Gunma Prefecture, about two hours north of Tokyo, by the end of November — and each one is matched to the place it sits in, per SoraNews24.
Shimonita gets Farfetch'd, Galarian Farfetch'd and Sirfetch'd — all three carry a leek — because the town is famous for the quality of its green onions. Naganohara gets Boltund, Meltan and Seaking at the Yamba Dam products shop, pairing electric and water types with a hydroelectric facility. Tatebayashi gets Zigzagoon at Tsutsujigaoka Park, whose name refers to the 10,000 azalea bushes that bloom there. Numata gets Dunsparce and Shiftry at a hiking trail entrance to Fukiware Falls, Shiftry chosen for its tengu resemblance and the folklore attached to nearby Miroku Temple. Shibukawa gets Zapdos at a ropeway station.
The Pokéfuta project exists to draw visitors to the parts of Japan that do not otherwise appear in a guidebook, and the mechanism is almost absurdly efficient: a cast-iron disc in the pavement, a reason to get off the train, and a prefecture's green onions suddenly attached to a character that several hundred million people recognise on sight. Gunma now has five more reasons for someone to look down.
Scraps
Markets & Macro
Steady copper volumes from the trader-miner with no change to the full-year guide.
Beer volumes soft, the non-alcohol portfolio carrying the quarter.
The bill for Zillow Offers lands after the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
Schedule change amid reports of an imminent roughly $17 billion deal to acquire Instacart.
World & Policy
Prediction markets meet a state gambling statute, with the Trump administration suing Utah on the other side.
UK welfare reform framed around conditionality ahead of the budget.
Washington routing its Southeast Asian security architecture through Singapore in 2027.
Overflight rights becoming an instrument of pressure on Taipei.
A character-licensing tie-up pulled after criticism in the Chinese market.
Tech & AI
A firmware-level bug under the operating system, where patching is slowest.
More than 41,000 records exposed after a claimed breach of the department's identity provider.
The figure maker joins a long list of Japanese consumer brands disclosing intrusions this month.
Culture & Play
The global girl group adds the region where most of its audience actually lives.
Japan's biggest manga franchise arrives in the world's biggest crossover machine.
Game 5 closes out a championship the club had waited its entire existence for.
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