Did Japan Secretly Control Crypto's Price Action? - January 5, 2026

Did Japan Secretly Control Crypto's Price Action? - January 5, 2026

In this episode, Ryan Tanaka from Teia Cafe examines the provocative idea that Japan has indirectly controlled crypto’s price action through its monetary policy. He unpacks the concept of the "Yen Carry Trade"—where speculators, especially in the U.S., borrowed ultra-cheap Yen to fuel investments in crypto, tech stocks, and AI startups, driving up asset prices while Japan maintained low inflation and stability at home.

Ryan links crypto’s recent downturn directly to the rise in Japanese Government Bond yields, which began climbing in 2022–2023, tightening the flow of cheap money. He notes that while Japan enjoyed being the stable lender, the U.S. became the speculative borrower—and now, as Japan’s bond yields hit 30-year highs, that era may be ending.

The discussion explores the cultural and economic contrasts: Japan’s stable, low-crypto-adoption society versus America’s boom-and-bust speculative cycles. With Warren Buffett moving into Yen and commodities, and the U.S. facing potential dollar inflation, Ryan suggests that diversification—including into overlooked crypto projects—may be wise. Ultimately, the episode frames crypto’s volatility as a symptom of deeper global liquidity shifts, with Japan’s financial policy acting as a hidden but powerful lever.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Ryan from Tea Cafe. This is season two, episode six. This one, what we're gonna be talking about, or at rather speculating on the idea that maybe Japan has been controlling crypto prices all along. Oh, it's a little bit exaggerated because you know the world is a complicated place and there's a lot going on uh at the same time, but there is some reason to think that uh especially recent news coming out of the banking system in Japan might help to illuminate what's been going on here in the United States in regards to Web3, crypto, even AI to some extent. So if you've been looking in the news lately, you might have if you check the financial section, you might have heard something about Japan's bond yields hit near 30-year highs. So this is from the Economic Times, but it says the 10-year 10-year JGB yield, uh, that's the Japanese government bond yield, jumped 5.5 basis points to 2.125% on Monday, its highest level since February 1999. Now that date is important because if you think about it, that's around the same time the tech bubble burst it as well. So, you know, with those, there's a correlation here happening that has happened before that we can also apply to what's happened in the last couple years. So, not to overcomplicate it, but basically the way that uh Japanese bonds has functioned in the global economy is that if you notice 2.1 is not that high, right? Uh, historically, it's been very, very, very low, and lots of countries, including the US, has been using it to basically check out take out cheap loans um in ways that they can't necessarily do domestically. They have that as well, but you know, money is money, and then anywhere you can get it, uh you would take it, right? And then Japan is part of that portfolio, and quite a significant part because the rates were so low. Um a lot of people do say that the price appreciation in various assets in the states, which includes crypto as well, but not just that, but housing, AI, tech stocks, you know, all those sorts of things, has been uh contributing to the quote growth, right? Gets it more complicated because what's the difference between inflation and growth, right? The the line is not always clear, but the after effects are pretty clear, right? The price of everything goes up. Now, compared to that, if you do some research on Japan's economy for the last couple of decades, the one thing you would notice is that inflation has been very, very low. Their currency is very stable. Even my dad, uh, who's been traveling from there uh since he was younger, he said that yeah, the prices in Japan hasn't changed since the 80s or 90s, it's kind of bizarre, right? It's like uh it's like living in uh inverted alien world, right? Financially speaking. And the same you can say about the the way that the country has treated crypto as well. So I made some of these points in the other episode where I talk about Satoshi and like the debtless society, but crypto was very popular between 2014 and 2018 or so, kind of one cycle before they got caught up in the West, and then after that, the popularity of it just kind of tanked. So, right now, Japan has one of the lowest crypto adoption rates in the world, despite the fact that they already went through all the regulations, you can already use Bitcoin in common grocery stores and markets if you really wanted to, but it's just uh it's just not that popular. Uh, compared to that, uh, here it was very, very incredibly popular 2021 or so, and then it the markets have kind of slowed down since then, right? So, in a weird way, it's like Japan is on a different cycle than the rest of the world in terms of uh these technology adoptions. But the interesting thing is that that is also reflected in the finances as well. So if you think about it, if lots of people were coming to Japan to borrow money, you know, treat it like a bank, right? You go to a bank, there's these low-interest loans, you take out money and you use those loans to put in your startup or crypto or buy Bitcoin or whatever, you know. And uh people have been doing that. They do say on a personal level, you should not bet on money you can't afford to lose, but it's a different story when you're talking about companies. Now it's debatable whether it's different, you gotta pay that money back anyway, but it's more accepted, right? It's part of the the I don't know, business as usual, for better or worse. So imagine people have been doing that for a very, very long time, and the fact that the bond yields are starting to go up is stoking some concern because it signals that we're about to enter a different era in the financial economy on a global scale. So, with with the shift that is happening right now, it's gonna be harder on Japanese imports, and people over there are worried about inflation. For the first time in a couple of decades, inflation might actually be a thing in Japan. Like with the anecdote I just said with my dad, like for a long time, the Japanese currency has been very, very stable, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they have been the lenders of the money, right? Rather than the speculators. So just imagine some American person going to Japan borrowing money to fuel their startup or something, right? Now, sometimes that those bets can pay off, they can pay off big, and that's what Americans like, right? We are all about entrepreneurship and changing the world and all that. Meanwhile, Japan is has been kind of quietly lending money and uh stabilizing their economy in a very, I would say a very rational way, right? For for better or worse. And when you go visit there, uh you can see the after effect too, right? Their country is very, very stable, crime is low, like uh everything's you know makes sense, and that's part of the reason why like a lot of people like visiting there, because it's it's just a nice place to visit, right? It has its ups and downs in regards to like lifestyle and wages and all, you know. But I think most people would agree that it is at least a pretty stable place, at least currently. So that's why these changes are causing concern on both sides because we're starting to see a shift in the way people are thinking about this. So this is a huge topic and cannot be covered in this one episode here, but we can look at some of these examples happening in crypto specifically just to kind of reinforce the point, right? So in recent memory, around 2022, 2000 2023 is when the crypto prices started to dip, right? We haven't quite gotten back to that uh era of hype. Even now, there's been like some price actions that look you know a little bit promising, but it is nowhere near the insanity that it was a couple years ago, right? But the interesting thing is this coincides directly with when the Japanese government bond yield shifted. So around then is when the money stopped flowing, at least from abroad, and it's hard to measure, like relatively speaking, how much of an impact that has had, but it definitely did have some impact, right? Sometimes all you need is one player to kind of drop out for the whole thing to kind of lose momentum, and that may be a part of it. So that's what I mean by like Japan controlling the prices of crypto, right? Now, that's just one example, right? This is called like the yen carry trade in the industry, basically borrowing money from yen and then using it for your own purposes. You know, that a lot of those things have continued well in well past crypto and flowed into AI, which is also part of the the issue that makes it complicated. Because the money still was coming in, but people may have just lost interest in like Web3 space for a while and then moved on to AI, right? A lot of the investment went that way. So you could argue that it was still continuing, maybe continuing to its day, but over time we do know that the momentum has started to shift, and people are looking at different avenues towards like what to do next. So uh this is going to be a relatively short one, but what is coming next? It's hard to tell. And Japan uh right now, their not only their economy, but their politics is uh shifting as well. You might have heard uh they have a new female prime minister there, and that person is like clamping down on immigration, and that's been causing quite a stir there because uh yeah, their labor economies cannot really stabilize without immigration, but at the same time, that causes, you know, uh people just don't like outsiders coming in at a very rapid pace, right? And that's been the case in the last couple of years, too. So part of the shift we see is like in tandem with those sorts of things. But one interesting thing worth talking about is that Warren Buffett has been investing in yen recently. He recently retired, I think he retired last week, in fact. Like he's he's retired for good now, you know. But he's always been a very sort of prudent investor that kind of sees what's happening next, right? So he did liquidate a lot of his stocks. Uh, Berkshire Hathaway has like been amassing cash because they don't feel good about what's happening in Wall Street right now. So they have been pulling out already, but he's looking at alternative assets. Um, he did mention like he's going back to the basic, like wood, just like farmland, right? Farmland, a lot of those uh assets. Uh what do you call them? Uh commodities, yeah. Basic commodities. Uh Michael Burry, in fact, is investing in water of all things, right? There's nothing more basic than that, right? Just so they're kind of going back to the fundamentals, you know, at least the smart money people are. And interestingly enough, the yen is part of that package, at least for Buffett. So I think he sees that things, you know, these shifts are happening, they're subtle. But because they're Japan could be entering into a growth phase, which this hasn't been the case for a very, very long time, um, there's potential opportunities there. So one thing people might consider doing is because I just made an episode about like the US dollar potentially going into hyperinflation, and um that's more realistic of a scenario than most people think. So I've been moving some of my cash into foreign currencies as well, which is a pretty standard strategy, right, when it comes to economic turmoil. I just have uh just you know keep on hand enough cash just to pay the bills and such, but most of the savings have gone into other things just as a hedge, right? Just in case. So we're gonna see a lot of that happen. Buffett has clearly stated that he does not like Bitcoin. I don't know how he feels about crypto as a whole, but he did clearly state that Bitcoin is not really, he doesn't consider it to be a safe haven from economic disruption. Because if we're being honest, like a lot of that money was fueled directly from some of the uh policies that have been going on, especially during COVID. So that is not something that traditional investors typically talk about, but at the same time, crypto being a decentralized currency could also, well, most likely, will be part of a diversified portfolio anyway, right? Maybe it's not Bitcoin for me, it's Tezos, but there are high-quality crypto projects out there that not a lot of people know about, and they may end up getting a benefit out of this whole thing. But let's be real, right? People were borrowing money from Japanese people and then betting it on their crypto casino. You know, if I had to make a soundbite-y version of it, uh, that would probably just be that, you know. But now that's coming to an end. The US has been borrowing against itself for a very long time, but it can't really continue to do that without inflating the currency even more, printing more money, right? So we're gonna have to see what happens there. But I do think there's some idea of I'm paying attention to what's happening in Japan, especially its history with the technology, because it can give a lot of insights into how things have played out up to this point and how they might play out in the future. So that's it. I hope you found this interesting, and see you in the next one. Take care.