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East Japan Railway (JR East) announced a 10-year plan Tuesday to dramatically revamp Suica services, including functions such as automatic walk-through ticket gates, cashless payments of over ¥20,000 and person-to-person money transfers. The company also plans to offer a subscription service. Dubbing the initiative the “Suica Renaissance,” the transport IC company plans to expand Suica beyond just a tool for transportation to becoming one for all payment-related necessities over the next decade. Within the next 10 years, JR East will develop automated walk-through gate technology so that passengers can enter the train platform without having to tap their Suica card or phone on the ticket gates. For stations in more rural areas where there are no ticket gates, the company plans to use passengers’ location information to track their transport fees. Source link

Bain Capital is increasing its offer for Fuji Soft with a bid that values the Japanese software company at $4.3 billion, extending a rare battle with KKR in the country’s booming buyout market. The Boston-based investment firm plans to pay ¥9,600 a share for Fuji Soft, it said in a statement on Wednesday. That’s 1.6% higher than KKR’s offer of ¥9,451 and values the company at around ¥647 billion ($4.3 billion). Source link

Nippon Life Insurance plans to acquire all the shares it does not own in Resolution Life Group Holdings for about $8.2 billion — an all-cash deal that gives Japan’s biggest insurer a firmer footing in the U.S. market. The deal is the largest overseas acquisition by a Japanese insurer to date and the second major transaction announced by Nippon Life this year. Japanese insurers are keen to expand abroad given limited growth prospects at home due to a shrinking and aging population. “For some time we have wanted to own a business that could be core in the largest global insurance market — the U.S.A,” Hiroshi Shimizu, Nippon Life’s president, told a news conference on Wednesday. Source link

Preparations for the 2026 Asian Games in Japan are going “smoothly,” its chairman said Wednesday, after reports the governing body told organizers to make significant improvements. Japanese media said the Olympic Council of Asia was not happy with preparations for the event in Nagoya and the wider Aichi Prefecture area and has accused organizers of not sticking to the host-city contract. Aichi Gov. Hideaki Omura, who also serves as chairman of the local organizing committee, told reporters that preparations were on schedule. “We are taking this in a calm manner and my understanding is that preparations are progressing smoothly,” he said. Reports said the OCA has demanded improvements in several areas, including accommodation and transport for athletes and teams. As many as 15,000 athletes could compete at the Sept. 19 to Oct. 4 Games — even more than the Olympics. The OCA has reportedly asked organizers to think again about their accommodation plans, which are said to involve housing athletes in container units and on a cruise ship. “We received opinions on the progress at a coordinating committee in September. We are preparing based on this,” an organizing committee spokesman said. The spokesman added that discussions with the OCA take place on “a daily basis.” AFP has approached the OCA for comment. The previous Asian Games were held in the Chinese city of Hangzhou in 2023, one year later than planned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Source link

Japan posted strong results in an international survey of adult skills released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on Tuesday. The survey, which involved approximately 160,000 participants between the ages of 16 to 65 from 31 countries and regions, included 5,165 randomly selected Japanese adults and was conducted between September 2022 and April 2023. The purpose of the survey is to examine the relationship between skills required in everyday life, and factors such as participants’ age and educational background. Source link

SEOUL – South Korean police said Wednesday that security guards were blocking a raid on President Yoon Suk Yeol’s offices to investigate his brief imposition of martial law. Yoon is already banned from foreign travel as part of an “insurrection” probe into his inner circle over the dramatic events of Dec. 3-4 that stunned South Korea’s allies. Police said earlier that a Special Investigation Team “has conducted a raid” on the presidential office, on different police agencies and on the National Assembly Security Service. Source link

The chair of Japan’s metalworkers’ union urged the government to accelerate efforts to raise pay, while expressing concern over premature tightening steps from the central bank. “We need to see improvements this year,” said Akihiro Kaneko, president of the Japan Council of Metalworkers’ Unions (JCM), speaking about the government’s measures to help smaller firms pass costs on to customers throughout the supply chain. “We’ll never have any improvement if we delay this effort for the next five or ten years,” Kaneko said in an interview Tuesday. Source link

North Korea shocked the world by sending more than 10,000 troops to Russia for its war against Ukraine — Pyongyang’s first deployment of troops for large-scale combat since the end of the Korean War in 1953. But while that number of troops may look impressive on paper, two leading experts on the Ukraine war say the real issue of concern should not be the deployment, but rather how deepened North Korean-Russian cooperation could revitalize and ultimately help modernize Pyongyang’s now-moribund defense industrial base. The North Korean troop dispatch comes as Russian forces absorb huge numbers of injured and killed in the war. Britain’s Defence Ministry said that Russia suffered 45,680 casualties in November — an average of 1,523 dead or wounded daily — a new high since its full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Source link

Traders have been perplexed over the past week as to when the Bank of Japan may hike rates following comments from officials and media reports that have sent mixed signals of the central bank’s intentions. The confusion has caused sharp swings in market bets on rate hikes, with overnight indexed swaps pricing in a 22% chance of a December rate increase, tumbling from 60% at the beginning of last week. The yen has weakened to as low as ¥152.18 per dollar this week from ¥150 last Friday, and was trading at ¥151.73 at 10:40 a.m. in Tokyo. BOJ Gov. Kazuo Ueda’s remarks in a Nikkei interview last month that hikes are “nearing” were followed a few days later by a Jiji Press report highlighting growing concern inside the central bank about a premature rate hike. Dovish policy board member Toyoaki Nakamura said last week that he doesn’t object to a rate hike but would have to look at data to decide on policy this month. Source link

Seoul/Istanbul/Berlin – While Nihon Hidankyo has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the feat came at a time when the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which has been at the center of the world’s efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear arms and promote disarmament, has lost its substance. Nihon Hidankyo, formally called the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, has advocated for a world without nuclear weapons. The group, which was awarded the peace prize in October, accepted it at a ceremony in Oslo on Tuesday. Some countries are moving to acquire nuclear weapons in an attempt to either maintain their dictatorial regimes or to strengthen deterrence against the backdrop of an increasingly uncertain global environment amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing conflicts in the Middle East. Source link