One of the year's most spectacular startup payoffs isn't in Silicon Valley or China, it's in Japan. Mercari Inc.'s $3.7 billion coming-out party will deliver a 149-times return to early investor United Inc., which engineered a ¥300 million ($2.7 million) round in the flea-market app ...

Yuzo Kano is trying to build a global cryptocurrency powerhouse, one former financier at a time. The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. alumnus, who turned bitFlyer Inc. into Japan's largest bitcoin exchange, is scooping up traders and bankers from both his old employer and former rivals ...

Nintendo Co. got its start in 1889 as a successful manufacturer of hanafuda (playing cards made out of stiff paper). Now the game-maker is embracing the same materials for its next trick. The Kyoto-based company on Friday started selling an unusual collection of attachments for ...

It calls itself a steel maker, but don't be misled by the name. Japan Steel Works Ltd. is no longer just the old-world metals firm that it started life as more than a century ago. These days, the Tokyo-based company is more a technology play, ...