Japan

Japan will charge a departure tax of 1,000 yen ($9.37) per person beginning next year, with plans to use the anticipated 40 billion yen raised annually to bolster tourism.

Foreigners and Japanese alike leaving the country by air or sea will pay the tax when they buy tickets, much like they do with airport facility fees. Travelers younger than 2 are exempted from the levy, which debuts Jan. 7.

With tourism-related spending by the government likely to mushroom, many legislators asked for specifics on how the new revenue could be used, citing the costs to secure enough workers for understaffed customs operations as well as spending to set up integrated resorts with casinos.

At the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference held in Singapore this [year], Japanese researcher Jun Rekimoto presented a form of tech called ChameleonMask which he dubbed a “Human Uber” that “shows a remote user’s face on the other user’s face.”

How it essentially works is: ChameleonMask uses a real human as a surrogate for another remote user. The surrogate user wears a display as a mask which shows a remote user’s live face and transmits the user’s voice.

The remote user sends the surrogate user directions on how to act, too.

A Select All report quoted Rekimoto as saying: “Our pilot study confirmed that people could regard the masked person as the right person.” 

If this is so, it could really change the way we live our lives, right down to getting someone else to go to work for us every day. Right?

Japanese men in their 30s and 40s are the biggest drivers of the bitcoin boom. 

Forty percent of bitcoin trading between October and November was conducted in yen, according to a Nikkei report.

Japanese investors, mostly men, came to dominate trading after regulators started to shut down cryptocurrency exchanges in China.

"More than a few Japanese investors positively value volatility," Muraki [of Deutsche Bank] said in a note on Thursday. He continued: "Japan’s investment style is typified by a combination of low-risk, low-return deposits and high-risk, high-return investments."

Many Japanese investors are engaged in leveraged trading, using borrowed funds. 

The Japanese government is urging steelmaker Kobe Steel to clarify the extent of manipulation of data on steel, aluminum and other metals used in a wide range of products, reportedly including rockets, aircraft and cars.

A government spokesman on Wednesday criticized the apparently widespread falsification of data as "inappropriate," saying it could undermine product safety.

Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Kotaro Nogami told reporters that about 200 of Kobe Steel's customers were affected.

Kobe Steel, Japan's third-largest steel maker, announced Sunday that between Sept. 1, 2016 and Aug. 31 of this year it had sold aluminum and copper materials using falsified data on such things as the products' strength.

The company said the materials included aluminum flat-rolled products, aluminum extrusions, copper strips, copper tubes and aluminum castings and forgings.

Japan's push to attract innovative financial technology (fintech) startups to the country could spell trouble for the US.

On Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government was moving forward with a plan to roll back regulations on some fintech startups to help spur the development of emerging technology and drive growth in the country.

As such, Abe is pushing for a regulatory sandbox program that would allow fintechs, startups looking to automate or digitize aspects of financial services, to operate and scale without meeting existing regulations.

"We will make a sandbox in which it is possible for certain participants to conduct trial and error freely on new business for a certain period of time without conforming to existing regulations," Abe said.

China’s Huawei technologies, the world’s third largest smartphone maker after Apple and Samsung, has announced plans to build new R&D facilities in Chiba, Japan.

This news shows the general trend of Chinese corporations becoming multinationals, but what struck Japanese people is not this news, but other news that Huawei Japan is offering the starting monthly salary of 400,000 Japanese yen.

According to Rikunabi, one of the largest Japanese on-line job search sites, Huawei is offering 401,000 yen for college graduates and 430,000 yen for Masters degree holders.

Uniqlo has made the most of inexpensive labor in Asia to become a leading global SPA player. But making goods overseas is not necessarily compatible with responding quickly to customer needs. That is why the company is rethinking the typical approach of churning out products in emerging economies.

To more swiftly respond to customer needs, the company is working on a system for sending out goods in as few as 10 days. To achieve that, airplanes will be essential, although costly.

Not every product needs to be delivered by air. But how to decide which item, and how many, should be shipped via plane? That is what the Ariake office is working on. It has established a system that suggests the best course of action after factoring in such variables as production status, inventory level, shipping time, shipping capacity for surface and air options, and delivery to the store.

Yamato Transport Co. has modified its parcel delivery time slots to reduce the burden on overworked drivers handling a sharp increase in parcels.

As of Monday, the door-to-door parcel delivery firm no longer allows noon to 2 p.m. as a designated delivery time so drivers can take a lunch break.

In addition, the company replaced the latest time slot in the day of 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. with a new slot of 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. to avoid the concentration of delivery orders in the final one hour.

In line with the change, Seven & I Holdings Co., Lawson Inc. and other retailers that offer online shopping using Yamato’s delivery services have revised their delivery time slots.

The so-called sharing economy has spread to a variety of fields such as cars and homes, and Japan has seen another rising trend in recent years—bicycles.

A growing number of municipalities and private firms are providing bikes to gauge whether such services will catch on.

According to NTT Docomo Inc., which has been teaming up with municipalities to offer a bike-sharing service on an experimental basis, its bicycles were used about 1.8 million times in fiscal 2016, which ended March 31, up from 20,000 in fiscal 2012.

Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile phone carrier, is partnering with Koto, Chiyoda, Minato, Chuo, Shinjuku, Bunkyo and Ota wards in Tokyo. Around 4,200 two-wheelers were available at 281 “stations” as of March. Docomo also offers bike-sharing in the cities of Yokohama, Sendai, Hiroshima and Naha, Okinawa Prefecture.