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Japan

Japan has favored voluntary guidelines over binding law, while hosting the G7 Hiroshima AI Process and standing up its own AI Safety Institute — tracked here daily.

Japan’s “Principle Code” for Generative AI (Part 2): What the Public Consultations Reveal

Japan’s draft “Principle Code” on intellectual property protection and transparency for generative AI (see our earlier post for a summary of the code) has attracted significant attention, with more than 2,000 consultation responses received from businesses, industry groups and rights holders. The responses suggest that transparency will play a central role in Japan’s approach to [...] The post Japan’s “Principle Code” for Generative AI (Part 2): What the Public Consultations Reveal appeared firs
Baker McKenzie Connect On Tech yesterday Policy Copyright & IPTransparency

Time to decide: A critical moment in Japan-US missile defense cooperation

In the face of growing air and missile threats in the Pacific, robust radar coverage and command networks will be critical to US and Japanese defense objectives, Tom Karako writes.
Breaking Defense (AI) 2d ago News Military & security

A Framework for Developing University Policies on Generative AI Governance: A Cross-national Comparative Study

arXiv:2504.02636v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As generative AI (GAI) becomes increasingly embedded in higher education, universities worldwide are developing policies to govern its ethical, pedagogical, and institutional use. However, these policies vary across national and institutional contexts. We undertake a cross-nationalanalysis of GAI guidelines issued by leading universities in the United States, Japan, and China, identifying key policy orientations and proposing a structured frame
arXiv cs.CY 2d ago Research RegulationChildren & education

Seven & i Abandons Investment Talks with Poland’s Zabka

Japan’s Seven & i Holdings Co. has ended talks over a potential investment in Poland’s largest convenience store operator Zabka Group SA, even as it continues to look for expansion opportunities ...
Bloomberg Technology 6d ago News Finance, VC & PE

Canada officially joins GCAP next-gen fighter program as observer

Japanese defense chief Shinjiro Koizumi said Canada’s new involvement in GCAP was “monumental.”
Breaking Defense (AI) 9d ago News Military & security

SoftBank sinks over 9% as Asia chip stocks track Wall Street AI sell-off

Japanese AI-linked stocks tumbled as a fresh rout in U.S. semiconductor shares spread across Asia after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's outlook failed to reassure investors.
CNBC Technology 13d ago News Finance, VC & PE

Japan's imperial family is diminishing. Plan for male-only succession could make it worse

A law set to pass Friday by Japan’s parliament could doom its 1,500-year-old hereditary institution by insisting that only men can be emperor, sparking worry about the shrinking, fast-aging imperial f ...
Washington Post Technology 14d ago News Regulation

NVIDIA and Japan Bring Full-Stack AI and Robotics to Every Industry

Home to leading manufacturers, robotics pioneers, infrastructure builders and iconic gaming companies, of course, Japan is one of the world’s centers of AI — building across the full stack with NVIDIA technologies. This week NVIDIA and its partners in Japan are showcasing the AI ecosystem’s latest advancements. Check back here for updates.
NVIDIA Blog (AI) 15d ago Field notes Agents & autonomy

Consumer evaluation of digital product passport information: Evidence from a conjoint analysis in Japan

Publication date: August 2026 Source: Telecommunications Policy, Volume 50, Issue 7 Author(s): Ornicha Boonpanya, Hitoshi Mitomo, Tokio Otsuka
Telecommunications Policy 16d ago Research Regulation

R&D accounting and innovation signaling: Insights from Japan's pre-regulation era

Publication date: October 2026 Source: Research Policy, Volume 55, Issue 8 Author(s): Kazuyuki Motohashi, Tomomi Takada, Ayung Tseng
Research Policy 16d ago Research Regulation

ICMHI--EI 2027 : 2027 11th International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics (ICMHI 2027)

2027 11th International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics (ICMHI 2027) [Kyoto, Japan] [May 28, 2027 - May 30, 2027]
WikiCFP artificial intelligence 16d ago Field notes Healthcare

iSRED 2026 : International Symposium on Social Robots and Ethical Design

International Symposium on Social Robots and Ethical Design [Fukuoka, Japan] [Nov 10, 2026 - Nov 11, 2026]
WikiCFP AI ethics 16d ago Field notes Agents & autonomy

SoftBank Group’s CEO says $5 trillion a year needed globally to meet AI demand

Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group’s CEO Masayoshi Son has ridiculed people who worry about a bubble in artificial intelligence investments.
Associated Press Technology 16d ago News Finance, VC & PE

Japan’s Evolving Defense Policy and the U.S.Japan Alliance

US Congressional Research Service (EveryCRSReport) 16d ago Policy RegulationMilitary & security

Unsupervised Pattern Analysis in Japanese Veterinary Toxicology: A Regulatory-Compliant Framework for Cross-Species Risk Assessment

Veterinary pharmacovigilance systems are essential for monitoring adverse drug events (ADEs), yet existing approaches often fail to capture region-specific toxicity patterns shaped by local biological and regulatory contexts. In Japan, these challenges are amplified by species-specific metabolic differences and reporting practices defined by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF). Most prior work relies on prediction-oriented models, limiting mechanistic interpretability. Th
arXiv 56d ago Research RegulationSafety & alignment

Question Type, Cognitive Load, and CEFR Alignment: Evaluating LLM-Generated EFL Grammar Drill Exercises

This study evaluates the pedagogical viability of LLM-generated English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning content. Utilising log data from Japanese junior high school students practicing on a grammar drilling application, we analysed how different question modalities impact student performance and whether theoretical localised CEFR difficulty tiers accurately predict empirical task difficulty. Results reveal a clear performance hierarchy: multiple-choice questions carried the lowest cognitive
arXiv 59d ago Research Safety & alignmentChildren & education

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes -- quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment -- using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoni
arXiv 69d ago Research Safety & alignmentPrivacy

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotati
arXiv 71d ago Research

Measurement Risk in Supervised Financial NLP: Rubric and Metric Sensitivity on JF-ICR

As LLMs become credible readers of earnings calls, investor-relations Q\&A, guidance, and disclosure language, supervised financial NLP benchmarks increasingly function as decision evidence for model selection and deployment. A hidden assumption is that gold labels make such evidence objective. This assumption breaks down when the benchmark ruler itself is sensitive to rubric wording, metric choice, or aggregation policy. We study this measurement risk on Japanese Financial Implicit-Commitment R
arXiv 91d ago Research RegulationTransparency

Generative AI Use in Professional Graduate Thesis Writing: Adoption, Perceived Outcomes, and the Role of a Research-Specialized Agent

This paper reports a survey of generative AI use among 83 MBA thesis students in Japan (target population 230; 36.1% response rate), conducted after thesis examiner evaluation. AI use was nearly universal: 95.2% reported at least some use and 77.1% heavy use. Students engaged AI across the full research-writing workflow - literature review, drafting, and consultation when stuck - reporting benefits centered on clearer argument and structure (82.3%), better revision quality (73.4%), and faster wr
arXiv 118d ago Research Children & educationAgents & autonomy

Structured Intent as a Protocol-Like Communication Layer: Cross-Model Robustness, Framework Comparison, and the Weak-Model Compensation Effect

How reliably can structured intent representations preserve user goals across different AI models, languages, and prompting frameworks? Prior work showed that PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based structured intent framework, improves goal alignment in Chinese and generalizes to English and Japanese. This paper extends that line of inquiry in three directions: cross-model robustness across Claude, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro; controlled comparison with CO-STAR and RISEN; and a user st
arXiv 121d ago Research Safety & alignment

EuraGovExam: A Multilingual Multimodal Benchmark from Real-World Civil Service Exams

We present EuraGovExam, a multilingual and multimodal benchmark sourced from real-world civil service examinations across five representative Eurasian regions: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and the European Union. Designed to reflect the authentic complexity of public-sector assessments, the dataset contains over 8,000 high-resolution scanned multiple-choice questions covering 17 diverse academic and administrative domains. Unlike existing benchmarks, EuraGovExam embeds all question content
arXiv 124d ago Research

Does Structured Intent Representation Generalize? A Cross-Language, Cross-Model Empirical Study of 5W3H Prompting

Does structured intent representation generalize across languages and models? We study PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based framework for structured intent representation in human-AI interaction, and extend prior Chinese-only evidence along three dimensions: two additional languages (English and Japanese), a fourth condition in which a user's simple prompt is automatically expanded into a full 5W3H specification by an AI-assisted authoring interface, and a new research question on c
arXiv 126d ago Research

How Do Language Models Process Ethical Instructions? Deliberation, Consistency, and Other-Recognition Across Four Models

Alignment safety research assumes that ethical instructions improve model behavior, but how language models internally process such instructions remains unknown. We conducted over 600 multi-agent simulations across four models (Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-4o mini, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, Sonnet 4.5), four ethical instruction formats (none, minimal norm, reasoned norm, virtue framing), and two languages (Japanese, English). Confirmatory analysis fully replicated the Llama Japanese dissociation pattern from a
arXiv 141d ago Research Safety & alignmentAgents & autonomy

Who Will Be the Members of Society 5.0? Towards an Anthropology of Technologically Posthumanized Future Societies

The Government of Japan’s “Society 5.0” initiative aims to create a cyber-physical society in which (among other things) citizens’ daily lives will be enhanced through increasingly close collaboration with artificially intelligent systems. However, an apparent paradox lies at the heart of efforts to create a more “human-centered” society in which human beings will live alongside a proliferating array of increasingly autonomous social robots and embodied AI. This study seeks to investigate the pr
OpenAlex 2638d ago Research Military & securityAgents & autonomy

Dynasties

For thousands of years, societies have fallen under the reign of a single leader, ruling as chief, king, or emperor. In this fascinating global history of medieval and early modern dynastic power, Jeroen Duindam charts the rise and fall of dynasties, the rituals of rulership, and the contested presence of women on the throne. From European, African, Mughal, Ming-Qing and Safavid dynasties to the Ottoman Empire, Tokugawa Japan and Chosŏn Korea, he reveals the tension between the ideals of kingshi
OpenAlex 3955d ago Research