The car industry is reinventing the wheel to prepare for autonomous vehicles. Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd., whose roots stretch back to when Henry Ford was building his Model T, is developing a "smart tire" that can monitor its own air pressure and temperature, and eventually ...

The only person in kimono at a recent government meeting on flying cars was Kotaro Chiba, a former online-game executive turned financier of a very specific kind. For Chiba, 44, who wears kimono on special occasions to show his pride in Japanese culture, is gathering ...

Toyota Motor Corp., Asia's biggest carmaker, is preparing for a potential future where people don't buy cars. That's behind the hefty investments the company has made in ride-hailing providers, most prominently the $1 billion it poured into Southeast Asian leader Grab. Toyota sees the partnership ...

Yoshiaki Murakami, who once struck fear into Japan's boardrooms and split public opinion with bitter activist battles, is now enjoying rare acclaim from executives and being praised as a peacemaker. Murakami, an outspoken champion of shareholder rights before his conviction for insider trading, has emerged ...

Facing the worst labor shortage in decades, Japan's carmakers have seen the light: hire more women. The problem is they're all having the same epiphany at the same time, and so now find themselves fighting over the world's smallest pool of female engineering graduates. The story ...

In a tiny, windowless meeting room high above the streets of Tokyo, Haruhiro Nakano starts to cry. The rail-thin, 54-year-old fund manager, who looks like a faded former J-pop star, has just shared his investing pitch, which sounds so deceptively simple you may not ...

Chika Kako is a rarity in Toyota Motor Corp.'s upper echelons. Last month, the 50-year-old was promoted to the No. 2 job at the luxury Lexus division, becoming the only woman among the automaker's top 53 managers. President Akio Toyoda has made diversifying his executive ...

Hideo Tsurumaki watched the giant tsunami crash onto Japan's northeast coast on March 11, 2011, sweeping away cars as people tried to escape from them. As the vehicles sank slowly into the sea Tsurumaki thought about his mother, who lives by the ocean in another ...

The world's biggest carmakers and technology companies are spending billions of dollars to perfect your ability to drive without thinking. But Nissan Motor Co. is taking a different direction — trying to "decode" your thinking so that hands-on driving is more fun. The Japanese company ...

Kobe Steel Ltd. raises fresh concern about the integrity of Japanese manufacturers after disclosing it falsified data on aluminum used in products ranging from cars to bullet trains.