Tokyo Core Printed 2.6 and 2.4. The Issuer Publishes Both, and the Word Is Doing Four Jobs.
Two publishers read Tokyo's October CPI and disagreed about core: 2.6 per cent year-on-year against a September prior of 2.9, or 2.4 against a prior of 2.7, with a third page from the second publisher saying core ticked higher. The Statistics Bureau's own preliminary release contains all of it. The issuer publishes four baskets: headline 2.8 per cent (index 103.5, from 2.7), ex fresh food 2.6 (103.3, from 2.7), ex fresh food and energy 2.6 (103.6, from 2.9, weight 9162), and ex food-other-than-alcohol and energy 2.4 (103.0, from 2.7, weight 6959). Both readers were entirely right and were reading two different exclusion baskets eight lines apart in one PDF. The month-on-month claims resolve the same way — the issuer gives +0.2 for one basket and +0.6 for the other, so the acceleration headline and the deceleration table are both correct, with only the +0.4 September figure left single-sourced. Nobody was half-right this time; the malformed question was ours. Where it genuinely broke is the consensus field: 2.8 is a one-tenth beat against one vendor's expected 2.7 and a fifty-basis-point miss against another's 3.3, and the 2.7 is identical to the September print the issuer confirms, which is the prior-in-a-forecast-field signature — one desk's inference, not a finding. Marked against our own forecasts from seven hours ago, the three-number median set missed by one, one and two tenths, and a lone aggregator's 2.6 was exact on core. The headline rose only because fresh food went from +1.7 to +8.6 per cent while energy went to minus 1.9, so every underlying measure fell. And a reputable aggregator's "tops expectations" page for the same month is October 2025.