"Data residency" Articles (6)

If You Pick Azure's Data Zone, How Much Actually Stays in Japan?

"We chose the Data Zone, so we are inside Japan" does not match what the official documentation actually says. Data at rest stays in the designated geography, but inference is described as "any Asia Pacific nation", which is not Japan. Here is what japaneast really offers, read from primary sources on 6 September 2026.

2026-09-06Ryuta Hamamoto

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Generative AI at Japanese Banks: What the Public Documents Say About Where Data Sits

When a Japanese financial institution runs generative AI, what do the public documents actually require about where the data sits? The FISC Security Guidelines themselves are a paid publication that outsiders cannot verify, so this piece uses only free sources: the FSA's AI Discussion Paper, FISC's own public reports, and the privacy regulator's Q&A. It separates knowing your data's location from confining it, and lists what belongs in the contract.

2026-09-06Ryuta Hamamoto

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Which Government Can Reach Your Data Abroad? CLOUD Act, China's Laws, GDPR

US law says disclose "regardless of whether" the data sits inside or outside the country. GDPR Article 48 says a foreign order is enforceable only through an international agreement. Japan's cabinet has stated that the "based on laws" exemption covers Japanese law only. Here is what the texts actually say, and where we stand.

2026-09-06Ryuta Hamamoto

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ISMAP Never Says "Keep the Data in Japan": I Searched All 45 Pages of the Control Standard

The service passed Japanese government procurement, so the data must be in Japan. Read the actual program documents and that inference falls apart. Across all 45 pages of the ISMAP control standard, the words for "Japan", "outside the country" and "cross-border" never appear once, and the clauses that touch location go no further than notifying customers which countries may hold their data and assessing the risk of foreign law reaching it. Here are the clause numbers.

2026-09-06Ryuta Hamamoto

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Vertex AI in the Tokyo Region: Seven Models You Can Call, Eight That Are Processed in Japan

Seven Google models answer at the Tokyo endpoint (asia-northeast1). Eight entries are committed to ML processing inside Japan. Those two lists live on different pages, in different tables, and they do not match. Here is what the official documentation actually says about endpoints, context length and jurisdiction.

2026-09-06Ryuta Hamamoto

ZEROCK

Can You Actually Run an LLM Inside Japan? What the Providers' Own Docs Say

"Available in the Tokyo region" and "processed only in the Tokyo region" are two different claims. Read the official documentation from AWS, Microsoft and Google and a pattern shows up: the newer the model, the less likely it can stay inside Japan. Here is what the docs actually say, and which rules genuinely require domestic processing.

2026-09-05Ryuta Hamamoto