Beneficiary of Japan's digital deficit and AI enterprise adoption

Japanese tourists have been flooding the country in recent years, generating an annual tourism surplus of roughly 6 trillion yen. Coincidentally, Japan's "digital deficit"—payments made to the US for cloud services, software, advertising, and subscriptions—has also hovered around 6 trillion yen. So, the money earned by tourists buying cosmetics and wagyu beef on the streets essentially flows back to AWS, Azure, and Google as rent. As AI expands, this hole will only widen; every additional Copilot seat a Japanese company opens adds another dollar-denominated bill. The remaining funds not yet sent abroad are being invested by retail investors into US stock index funds through the new NISA program, amounting to several trillion yen annually, ultimately ending up in the hands of the same companies 🌚 In this scenario, I'm skeptical about how much the Bank of Japan can strengthen the yen solely through interest rate hikes. $MSFT