Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2667 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) overhauled the catch-all export-control framework under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA) — the first comprehensive review of Japan's catch-all controls in 12 years (since 2013). Cabinet decisions were taken on 25 March 2025 and 4 April 2025 with METI's consolidated announcement on 9 April 2025; the amended Cabinet Order entered into force on 9 October 2025. The reform (i) splits catch-all-controlled items into "core items" (high dual-use risk, including certain semiconductors and machine tools) and a general catch-all tier, (ii) adds a new end-user requirement alongside the existing end-use requirement and extends both from UN-arms-embargo countries only to "general countries" (everywhere outside Group A), materially expanding the perimeter of items requiring METI export licences for general-country end-users including China, and (iii) introduces an "informed" condition for exports to Group A countries — once METI notifies an exporter of a defined risk pattern, a Group A export becomes licence-required, addressing transit-export-circumvention to Russia. Structurally distinct from the 23-category equipment-specific 2023 amendment (2023-03-31-japan-meti-semi-equipment-export-controls); this is the underlying horizontal catch-all reform and brings Japan's framework closer to US BIS EAR catch-all controls.

Japan's Cabinet approved an amendment to the Cabinet Order on Inward Direct Investment under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA) on 1 April 2025; the order was promulgated 4 April 2025 and entered into force 19 May 2025. The amendment introduces two new investor categories — Type-A (investors legally or contractually obligated to share information with foreign governments) and Type-B (investors effectively in a comparable position without formal legal obligation) — and eliminates or narrows exemptions from mandatory prior-notification screening for both categories. The primary driver is concern over minority-stake acquisitions by Chinese investors in Japanese listed companies operating in sensitive sectors including cloud computing, telecommunications infrastructure, semiconductor equipment, and advanced electronics. The reform is structurally distinct from the outbound FEFTA catch-all controls overhaul (2025-10-09) and from the Economic Security Promotion Act (2022-05-18); it is the inbound FDI-screening complement to that framework.

The Bureau of Industry and Security added 77 entities (under 78 entries) to the Entity List via a December 22, 2020 final rule (FR Doc 2020-28031). The headline designation is Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) — China's largest contract chipmaker — for activities related to military-civil fusion (MCF), with a presumption of denial applied to all items uniquely required to produce chips at advanced nodes of 10 nanometers or below. The batch also covers entities that supported PRC militarisation of artificial islands in the South China Sea and entities implicated in human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.