Japan has confirmed it bought yen alongside the United States Treasury on Friday, and the same statement says Tokyo plans to draw on a Federal Reserve facility
Japan bought yen with the United States Treasury.
Satsuki Katayama, the finance minister, said so in a statement posted to the ministry's website at half past seven on Monday morning in Tokyo, which was half past six on Sunday evening in New York. Five sentences, no figure. The operation ran on Friday 31 July, United States Eastern time, and the ministry says it purchased the yen "in coordination with the U.S. Department of the Treasury" in an action that "countered excessive volatility and disorderly movements in the Japanese yen in recent months."
Then the sentence that is not about Friday: "We will not hesitate to conduct further joint intervention."
The agreement it rests on
The statement names its authority, which is unusual enough to be worth following.
It says the joint action was taken pursuant to the United States and Japan finance ministers' joint statement of September 2025. That document was published by the Treasury on 11 September 2025 and it is short. In it the two sides concurred that where intervention "may be considered, it should be reserved for combatting excess volatility and disorderly movements in exchange rates," and added that the tool was equally appropriate against disorderly appreciation as against depreciation. Tokyo has now used the first half of that sentence as the ground for buying its own currency, and has said in public which paragraph it was standing on.
The same 2025 statement contains a second commitment that governs when the rest of this becomes knowable. Both governments committed to public disclosure of "any foreign exchange intervention operations on at least a monthly basis."
The last line, which is doing separate work
Japan also plans to use the Federal Reserve's FIMA repo facility.
That is the closing sentence of Monday's statement and it concerns a different mechanism entirely. The Federal Open Market Committee made the facility standing on 28 July 2021. Under it the Federal Reserve enters into overnight repurchase agreements with foreign official institutions against the Treasury securities those institutions already hold in custody at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at a rate the 2021 statement set initially at 25 basis points, with a per counterparty limit at that time of $60bn. In plain terms it converts Treasuries into overnight dollars without a sale.
The statement does not say what Japan would use those dollars for, and no purpose is supplied here.
Washington has published nothing
One half of a joint action has announced it. The other half has not.
The Treasury's press release index carries no item on the operation. Its newest release is a notice of the G7 2026 Cross Border Coordination Exercise, dated 31 July, which was already the newest when this site checked the same page on 1 August. Currency operations are frequently left unannounced by the party conducting them, so the silence is recorded here as a silence and not read as a contradiction of Tokyo.
When the size arrives
On 31 July the ministry published a total of zero for intervention in the window running 29 June to 29 July, and this site reported that figure on 1 August alongside the wire accounts of operations on 30 and 31 July that fell outside it. Monday's statement confirms one of those days.
The amount still does not exist in the public record. Friday sits in the window that closes at the end of August, and that release is the first document that will carry a number.
