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 ...

Shuntaro Furukawa grew up playing the Family Computer, eventually realizing every teenager's dream of joining the company that made the genre-defining console. Now, as the next president of Nintendo Co., he has the chance to build a new franchise atop a hit product — ...

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 ...

Nintendo Co. is teaming up with San Francisco-based Scrum Ventures to scout startups working on new ways to play or use the company's hit gaming console, the Switch. The program, run by Scrum, will look for startups, teams within larger companies or university researchers developing ...

Competitive gaming in Japan has found a champion: hedge fund boss Seth Fischer. The chief investment officer of Hong Kong-based Oasis Management Co., which owns more than $1 billion in Japanese securities, said esports is now among his top five investment themes for Japan. He ...

The world's largest car maker and the world's biggest ride-hailing company plan to team up on autonomous driving as technological changes sweep through the transportation industry. On Thursday, Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., posted a photo on Twitter of him and ...

Uber Technologies Inc. isn't ready to give up the world. Dara Khosrowshahi, in his first trip to Asia since becoming chief executive officer, made it clear that the ride-hailing company isn't about to scale back its business to just countries where it already has a ...

Japanese frogs are proliferating across Asia. The good news is, they're not an invasive species, nor are they real. "Tabi Kaeru" ("Travel Frog") became the No. 1 downloaded smartphone app in China for almost two weeks after its debut, and it is still hovering at ...

A skinny chain smoker with pale skin, Yota Kachi doesn't look much like a professional athlete. But this weekend, the 31-year-old will get a chance to become one by playing video games. Japan will begin the process of legalizing paid esports with a tournament near ...