A publisher called 157.00 a pinning level with spot fifteen pips away.
Dollar-yen traded 36 pips below it and closed 38 pips above. We also finally have the notional — 1.4 billion dollars — from Minkabu, which prints the expiry ladder with sizes while the page we habitually read hides them in an image. Tokyo opens 157.34 and the Tankan printed plus 24 against plus 25. Thirteen hours on, the Ministry's English page still has not said zero.
The Ministry of Finance published zero for 27 August to 28 September at 10:01 UTC, and three wires had it inside thirteen minutes.
Our 10:00 convention held and our reading that September's defence was words held. But at 11:50 the Ministry's own English page still listed July–August as its latest entry and the September URL returned a 404 — the primary source was the last place the number existed. The day-by-day data lands 2–9 November.
Nine timed rows on one publisher's preview of today's US session, and every one is exactly sixty minutes early — same sign, no scatter.
A third reader that renders in UTC agrees with us, not with them. Lay the real schedule over a fifteen-minute rule and 195 of the 330 minutes between 09:45 and 15:15 are inside a window, 105 of them unbroken. One of those windows rests on a time the issuing ministry does not publish.
Tokyo opens with dollar-yen just under 159.00 after printing 159.03, its first 159 handle since 2 September.
Spot sits 98 pips above the 18 September rate-check level and 97 below the round number — but the nearest level Japan actually acted at is 160.50, not 160.00. And the 200-day average everyone says broke is two different numbers.
Since 1 September the US three-year has repriced 51 basis points and the thirty-year 13 — the whole move is in the belly.
The 20s/30s inversion survived a fourth session and widened to 5bp, and Japan's intervention capacity is held in the instrument doing the repricing.