Taiwan's Taiex rose 1,960.06 points to close at 41,661.70, a 4.94% gain that ended a seven-session decline, after authorities moved to curb short selling and deploy a stabilisation fund; TSMC and MediaTek both rose at least 6%, and the index was up as much as 6.4% intraday, its most since 31 July. Korea went the other way. The KOSPI was up more than 1.5% in the morning and closed 0.79% lower at 5,018.85, shedding 39.91 points, after foreign investors sold ₩658 billion of shares, on the day's regional tally.

For anyone trading Tokyo, that split is the useful information in today's Asian session. Japan's semiconductor complex rebounded with Taiwan's, not with Korea's — and the mechanism in Taiwan was an announced official backstop, which is not a fundamental and does not transfer. A Tokyo market that just took its cue from a stabilisation-fund rally is a Tokyo market with less underneath it than the print suggests.

Walleye Capital, managing about $17 billion, told investors in a 5 November letter that it will restructure its internal stock-picking unit, cut much of that team's leadership and personnel, return some capital and shift resources toward volatility and quantitative strategies, after losing 5.9% in October — its worst month since March 2020, according to this account of the letter. The same account records October losses of 2.3% at Millennium's flagship, 5.4% at Marshall Wace's Eureka strategy, 2.4% at ExodusPoint and 2.3% at North Rock Capital.

These are multi-manager platforms, not AI-thesis funds, and that is precisely why it is worth knowing. When a platform shrinks a book it shrinks all of it, including the Japanese and Asian legs that had nothing to do with the loss. One fund restructuring is not a crisis and nobody has described it as forced; what it does establish is that the supply of risk capital available to Asian equities in November is smaller than it was in September, which is a different thing from sentiment.

China's producer price index rose 5.7% in October against a 5.3% consensus, the fastest since June 2022 and a third consecutive monthly acceleration driven by mining and raw materials, while consumer inflation slowed to 0.7% from 0.9%, as reported on the release. Producer purchasing prices rose 7.9%, outpacing output prices by 2.2 points.

That gap is the story: Chinese manufacturers are absorbing input costs in their margins rather than passing them on, because domestic demand will not take the increase. For Japan it cuts both ways and the net is not obvious. China exporting goods inflation instead of deflation raises imported input costs for Japanese manufacturers and argues, at the margin, for the Bank of Japan to move in December. But a Chinese industrial base squeezing its own margins to hold price is also a Chinese industrial base getting harder to compete with on cost — which is the problem Japanese component makers have been describing all season.

Chinese banks — state-owned, joint-stock and foreign — have raised dollar deposit rates to levels unseen since at least 2023, some above 4.5% against US benchmark rates near 4.8%, to discourage exporters and savers from converting dollars into yuan, Reuters reported today from bankers at six or more banks. The yuan has appreciated roughly 10% against the dollar since early 2025 and recently touched a four-year peak of 6.6449. The People's Bank of China did not respond to a request for comment.

Read it next to the yen. One Asian export power is spending record sums to stop its currency falling while the other is paying its savers to stop its currency rising, and the gap between those two postures is where Japanese and Chinese exporters compete. A yuan this strong is the single most underrated support for Japanese industrial pricing power right now, and Beijing has just told you it intends to lean against it.

China will extend the suspension of an additional 24% tariff on US goods for another two months from 13:01 Beijing time on Tuesday, retaining a 10% blanket levy, and will keep its special port fees on American ships suspended until 10 January, state broadcaster CGTN reported. The move formalises the leaders' agreement to run the truce to January.

Two months is not a settlement, it is a rolling option, and the renewal date now sits in the same January window as a set of other expiries. For Japan the relevant exposure is shipping and the trade-sensitive machinery complex: the port-fee suspension in particular keeps a direct cost off transpacific routes that Japanese liners and shippers also price against.

A drone strike hit Iraq's Khor Mor gas field on Sunday, igniting an LPG storage tank and suspending production, and the Kurdistan region's electricity ministry said roughly 2.8 gigawatts of generation went offline as a result, according to this report. The field is jointly operated by UAE-based Dana Gas. No party claimed the strike; Kurdish officials have blamed Iranian-backed militias for previous attacks on the same facility and called this one a terrorist attack.

Brent nonetheless eased, after President Trump indicated he was highly unlikely to order fresh attacks on Iran while talks to end the conflict progress, in the day's Asian market account. That is the more consequential of the two facts for Tokyo: a supply interruption in Kurdistan is a regional electricity event, while a de-escalation signal on Iran is a direct input into Japan's energy import bill and its trade balance.

As of Friday's close the S&P 500 stood at 7,376.86, down 2.57% on the day, the Nasdaq Composite at 24,579.42, down 3.23%, and the Dow at 51,285.73, down 0.87%. Asian markets then climbed on Monday after a recovery in AI shares, as Al Jazeera reported on the regional session. American trading on Monday is still in progress as this publishes.

The week's actual macro event is the US inflation print, with a run of Fed speakers around it, per MarketWatch's weekly agenda. Everything Tokyo did today was borrowed from New York's Friday recovery; the loan comes due when American data actually prints.

Three House Republican committee chairs have written requesting a closed-door briefing with Nvidia's chief executive on 18 November, saying recent reports "raise significant national security concerns regarding the [People's Republic of China's] access to sensitive U.S. technology and information," CNBC reported. Senator Chris Coons, in line to chair Senate Foreign Relations in January, said "Congress will investigate and get answers." Representative Seth Magaziner of the House Homeland Security Committee called for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Huang to testify. Senator John Cornyn circulated reporting that the administration had approved a Chinese firm to assemble Nvidia chips in Beijing and called it "outrageous."

The personal story is not the market story. Nvidia's board opened an independent review on Sunday after Huang admitted an affair and said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and President Trump called him "an honorable guy." What Congress is actually asking about is Megaspeed's suspected role in circumventing restrictions on AI chip sales — in other words, where the chips went. That question has a direct Tokyo attachment: Japan's testing and equipment names sell into whatever volume of advanced silicon actually gets built and shipped, and they rose hard today on exactly that assumption.

Terafab, the Tesla–SpaceX chipmaking venture, visited Japan and showed domestic equipment suppliers what it intends to buy, asking for delivery within a few months. One Japanese equipment maker's response, as reported: "It is an absurd order, but we have no choice but to try to accommodate it." The venture has told suppliers it is targeting one million silicon wafers a month from 2032 — roughly 700,000 memory and 300,000 logic — in an account of the Japanese sourcing effort. SpaceX documents note that the schedule, phases and capital expenditure are still subject to negotiation and not finalised.

Hold that million against the comparison the same report makes: it is 40 times the 25,000 wafers a month Rapidus is targeting at Chitose. Treat the 2032 number as an ambition rather than a plan — the financing is explicitly unsettled. The near-term fact is harder and better: a new buyer is in the Japanese toolmakers' order book asking for immediate slots, in a quarter when the market has been marking those same companies down on the premise that AI capex is rolling over.

Nvidia, Korean chip designer Rebellions and SK Telecom announced a partnership to build sovereign AI infrastructure for Korea, connecting Rebellions' Rebel R200 neural processing units to Nvidia's platform via NVLink Fusion and using the MGX rack architecture, with support from Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT, announced today. The stated aim is AI services built for Korea's language, industries and priorities. Separately, Korea's science ministry said today that the investigation at Nvidia will not disrupt GPU deliveries the country has already contracted, with 10,000 units funded under a 2025 supplementary budget already in use and the 2026 tranche still under contract for this year, per the ministry's assurance.

The architectural detail is the one to notice. NVLink Fusion lets a domestic accelerator sit inside an Nvidia rack rather than compete with it, which is how a country gets a sovereign-AI story without displacing the incumbent. Japan's equivalent question is live and unanswered: Japan has the fab ambition at Rapidus and the carrier-scale AI revenue — SoftBank Corp's cloud and AI line grew better than 35% this half — but no announced domestic accelerator occupying the slot Rebellions just took in Seoul.

Sega and Sega Fave disclosed today that 2,196,044 email addresses were exposed through unauthorised access at Arara Inc., the email-distribution provider and a subsidiary of PayCloud Holdings (4015). The underlying breach exposed roughly 77 million addresses across up to about 380 corporate clients of the Arara Message service, with some clients' data also including names, telephone numbers and addresses, as the Japan Times reported on the scale. Sumitomo Mitsui Banking has put its own exposure at 227,216 addresses.

Shogakukan separately announced today that approximately 1.99 million member email addresses and related records may have leaked through unauthorised access at a contractor handling its email distribution, NHK reported. The pattern is the governance point rather than the security one: a games publisher, a bank and a publishing house all discovered their customer lists in the same place, because all three had outsourced the same function to the same layer. Third-party risk disclosure in Japan is about to get more specific, and the vendor's own listed parent is the first place that shows up.

Asked on CBS whether the United States should accept the risks of artificial intelligence in order to stay ahead of China, President Trump said the dangers were manageable and signalled openness to working with Democrats on safeguards: "I don't mind guardrails. But I don't wanna put us in a deep second position," adding that China has no guardrails, in an interview aired on 8 November.

This is the exact variable the Tokyo analyst community flagged today as the cap on the rebound — wariness about American policy moves on AI regulation. The useful part of the answer is the asymmetry it reveals: an administration that frames safety rules as a competitiveness cost will not write binding ones quickly, but it has just invited Democrats who are preparing hearings to the table. For Japanese suppliers the risk is not US safety regulation, which looks slow; it is the chip-export and assembly-approval regime that Congress is now pulling on from the other end.

Apple has imposed a $200 daily per-engineer budget on internal AI tool usage, according to this report. Separately, Apple is racing to make Siri genuinely agentic, as The Verge reported.

The two facts belong together. A company that is behind on agents and simultaneously metering how much agent compute its own engineers may consume is making a cost judgement in the middle of a capability race, and $200 a day per head is a serious allowance rather than a token one — which tells you how much these tools now cost at the frontier of real use. For the Japanese supply chain the relevant signal is not Apple's AI roadmap but its component orders, and a company counting inference pennies internally is a company that will count them in its bill of materials too.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said at the company's results briefing last week that it is not considering further changes to the Switch 2 price, adding: "There has been no major change to the memory situation and Nintendo is in a position to secure sufficient quantities," as reported on the briefing. The console's US recommended price had already gone to $499.99 this year, with memory costs cited in the rationale.

This is the consumer-electronics end of the same memory cycle driving the AI trade, and it is a useful independent check on it. AI demand is bidding for the same DRAM that goes into a games console, and the console maker's answer is that it has secured its volumes and will absorb the cost rather than reprice into the holiday quarter. A hardware company choosing margin compression over a price rise is telling you it believes unit demand is fragile — which is a quieter signal about the consumer than anything in this week's macro calendar.

Ayano Ōmoto — Nocchi of the technopop trio Perfume — announced on Sunday through her agency Amuse that she has married the actor Kento Shibuya, both 38, thanking fans for years of support and promising more enjoyable moments ahead, Anime News Network reported. She is the second of the three to marry in twelve months, after Ayaka Nishiwaki announced her own marriage in November 2025.

Perfume have been together since they were schoolgirls in Hiroshima, which is most of three decades of the same three people in the same formation. Two weddings in a year is the sort of news that reads as an ending and is usually not one — the trio's whole career has been built on the assumption that the three of them keep showing up.

The TV anime adaptation of Keigo Shinzō's Hirayasumi will stream on Netflix, Anime News Network reported, with Gen Hoshino performing the opening theme, also confirmed this weekend.

Hirayasumi is a manga about a cheerful man in his late twenties who inherits an old house in Tokyo and lets his art-student cousin move in — no plot engine, no antagonist, just two people being broke and fond of each other in a city that is expensive. Putting Hoshino on the opening is an unusually exact piece of casting: he has spent a career writing songs about ordinary rooms.

The Chiikawa anime film retained the top spot at the Korean box office, holding off the domestic corporate thriller Final Interview, per Variety's weekend report.

Chiikawa is a cast of extremely small round animals who cry easily and are frequently employed in menial labour by larger animals. That this is the thing currently beating a Korean prestige drama in Korean cinemas is a fair measure of where Japanese soft power has actually landed in 2026 — not epics, not samurai, but a hamster-adjacent creature having a hard week.

A Miyazaki remark circulating widely — "The problem with young anime artists today is that the only thing they study is anime," and "if you grow up and all you watch is anime, you're just regurgitating spinning wheels" — originally came from an August podcast appearance by Roland Kelts, the author of Japanamerica, recounting the conversation. The detail the viral version dropped: after saying it, Miyazaki reportedly smiled and added, "Old people are always complaining about the next generation," as the fuller account notes. Kelts has since clarified that Miyazaki was describing artists whose influences are anime alone, not young animators generally.

Miyazaki's own generation read Dostoevsky and looked at Impressionists, which is the actual content of the complaint: not that young artists are lazy, but that a closed loop of references produces closed-loop work. The coda he added is the better half of the quote, and it is the half that does not travel.

Kasumi Yasuda's Fool Night has passed one million copies in circulation worldwide, Anime News Network reported.

The premise is that sunlight has essentially gone, food cannot be grown, and the poor can volunteer to be converted into plants — "flowering" — in exchange for money for their families. It is a hard sell on a bookshop table and it got to a million anyway, which says something about how much appetite there is for science fiction that commits fully to its own idea rather than softening it.

Bibilab's Meowgaroo Hoodie 3 — the Nyangaru Parka 3 — is roomwear with a large marsupial-style pouch across the stomach, sized for a cat to nestle in, with a drawstring to adjust the opening and a removable dual-layer lining so the inside can be washed, as SoraNews24 documented with pictures. It costs 8,900 yen, comes in medium and large, and is on Amazon Japan.

The details are where the engineering shows. The hood has cat ears, and the tips of its drawstring cords are not tassels but working cat teasers. The chest pocket is sized specifically to hold a smartphone, on the clearly correct assumption that anyone wearing a cat in a pouch will want to film it. It is the third generation of the product, which means the first two sold.