Japan’s technology news
January 2023 round-up
Technology news headlines from Japan in January of 2023 touched on issues and subject areas including facial recognition, the country’s moves in the cyber-defense space, Japan’s venture capital space regulation amendments, and more.
And for our other editions, spanning daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly updates on Asia’s technology spaces, here’s an outline.
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Asia Pacific Region
- Japan: Toyota supplier, Denso, looks to Taiwanese partners in move to reshape auto supply chains, seeing the need to limit dependence on Chinese components
- Japan and US boost defense cooperation with MOU on shared standards for gov’t-procured software, protecting critical infrastructure, reducing risks to socioeconomic activity and confidential info
- Japan: Foreign Ministry to launch AI-backed system to collect and analyze fake information on social media and other platforms, aiming to track how foreign actors try to influence public opinion
“Disinformation campaigns are part of what is called cognitive warfare — which involves manipulating public opinion and sowing dissent through social media and other channels. Given its potential reach, it is increasingly considered a sixth domain of conflict after land, sea, air, space and the cyber realm.”
- Japan’s NTT Corp enters US Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative to boost cyber defense and reduce risk to critical infrastructure
- 1.3M Japanese customers of Aflac and Zurich insurance companies had personal information leaked following hack of at third-party service provider
- Animoca Brands Japan subsidiary invests $780K in Psychic VR Lab, XR firm incorporating NFTs
- West Japan Railway to deploy tests of facial recognition-operated ticket gates at 2 Osaka train stations
“According to the company, the face recognition machines to be installed at both stations will starting operations on March 18 and use a camera mounted on the ticket gate to read the user’s face and match it with a pre-registered photo.”
- Japan to remove a key limit on overseas investments by domestic venture funds dedicated to backing startups, in a bid to attract more foreign investors into the sector
- Pegasus Tech Ventures VC firm partners Japan’s Denka chemical and life sciences major for $100M fund to focus on startups in renewable energies, EV batteries, chips and health-tech
- Need To Know Now — Need To Know Now, Jan 28th: Fertilizer, Myanmar, AI, EVs and cyberwarfare
- 4 of Japan’s major telecoms corporations partner Uzbekistan’s state-owned telco for infrastructure development project, including data centers in 3 cities
IMF: Towards Central Bank Digital Currencies in Asia and the Pacific
More of Asia’s tech news headlines
The monthly collections listed by country, above, are drawn from our daily Asia tech news updates, which go out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and via mobile app.
We also deliver weekly updates in newsletter formats, via LinkedIn and Substack; and each of those also provides our tech newsletters in web format, for reading online.
Beyond these, we also produce quarterly collections, gathering a jurisdiction’s technology news into 3-monthly digests each year.
Accenture: Digital Assets – Unclaimed Territory in Asia
