An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Ministry of Finance spent nearly $50 billion on April 29 and May 1 trying to prop up the value of the currency by selling US dollars and buying yen. Who was on the other side of this trade? Data from Deutsche Bank's foreign exchange trading platform suggests: literally everyone. "Nearly all client categories saw record USD/JPY buying during the assumed intervention days," writes George Saravelos, global head of FX research at the German bank, in a note to clients on Thursday. "That absorption of USD/JPY selling from the Japanese Ministry of Finance was so broad-based continues to point to the lack of effectiveness of this policy." The Japanese yen is the weakest G10 currency in trading on Thursday, deepening its decline relative to the US dollar to nearly 10% so far this year. Very low rates in Japan increase the appeal of holding other currencies where investors can earn more interest. Strategists have warned that action from the Bank of Japan may be needed to reinforce the Ministry of Finance's attempts to guard against further yen weakness.

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Under a new agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the first non-American on the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign will be a Japanese astronaut. SpaceNews reports: At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama signed an agreement regarding an additional Japanese contribution to Artemis, a pressurized lunar rover called Lunar Cruiser. NASA will deliver the rover to the moon, which the agencies said should take place ahead of the Artemis 7 mission scheduled for no earlier than 2031. NASA will also provide two seats on future Artemis lunar landing missions to astronauts from the Japanese space agency JAXA, the first agency other than NASA to secure spots on landing missions. The Japanese rover will support extended expeditions from Artemis landing sites that are beyond the range of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle that three American companies are developing for NASA under contracts announced April 3. The rover is designed to accommodate two astronauts for up to 30 days, with an overall lifetime of 10 years. The announcement, though, offered no details about when the Japanese astronauts would fly to the moon. "It depends," Nelson said at an April 10 briefing when asked about schedules, noting that the two countries "announced a shared goal for a Japanese national to land on the moon on a future NASA mission assuming benchmarks are achieved." "No mission has been currently assigned to a Japanese astronaut," added Lara Kearney, manager of NASA's extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program, at the briefing. The implementing agreement (PDF) said several factors will go into crew assignments, including progress on the pressurized rover, or PR: "The timing of the flight opportunities will be determined by NASA in line with existing flight manifesting and crew assignment processes and will take into account program progress and constraints, MEXT's request for the earliest possible assignment of the Japanese astronauts to lunar surface missions, and major PR milestones such as when the PR is first deployed on the lunar surface." The assumption among many in the industry, though, is that at least one of the astronauts will fly before the rover is delivered, and possibly as soon as the Artemis 4 mission, the second crewed landing, in the late 2020s.

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Japan's largest telecommunications company and the country's biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative AI, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked. From a report: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing. The Japanese companies' manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users' attention without regard to morals or accuracy. Unless AI is restrained, "in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars," the manifesto said. It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

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