Japanese monthly magazine Nikkei Trendy has unveiled its ranking of the top 30 products and services expected to become hits in 2027, with "anti-AI" emerging as the central theme as consumers increasingly seek ways to distinguish genuine human activity from artificial intelligence-generated content.
Six thousand yen. That's the charge a Japanese citizen, or a foreigner who lives in the country, will pay at the casino door of the resort now going up on Yumeshima, the reclaimed island in Osaka Bay that hosted Expo 2025.
The AI Film Festival Japan 2026, one of Asia's largest international film festivals dedicated to works created using artificial intelligence, held its awards ceremony in Tokyo on November 1, attracting more than 730 submissions from over 60 countries and regions, with short films and animation accounting for the majority of entries.
A visitor stands outside a small restaurant in Kyoto trying to work out three things. Whether the place takes cards. Whether they need a reservation. And whether walking in without Japanese is going to be awkward for everybody.
Japanese retail giant Aeon unveiled a logistics warehouse on October 30 equipped with "physical AI" robots capable of independently sorting and stacking products, allowing the company to automate approximately half of its warehouse operations while increasing loading efficiency to four times that of manual labor.
Artificial intelligence is opening new possibilities for digital creativity, allowing people to transform ideas into illustrations, animated characters and short films without the extensive technical skills or expensive production equipment traditionally required, with platforms such as Japan-inspired AI art service PixAI bringing these capabilities to a growing community of creators.