The Tokyo equities markets were up on Friday as the Nikkei 225 added 0.6 percent to 16,127.58 and the Topix index gained 0.5 percent to 1,610.73.
The real estate sector was up 1.8 percent as a whole as there were more indications that property prices are on the rise. Mitsubishi Estate was 2.2 percent higher to ¥2,580.
Softbank added 7.2 percent on the session to ¥2,445 after it introduced 13 handsets for Vodafone Japan, it’s mobile arm, which will continue under the Softbank brand from Sunday. The handsets are believed by some analysts to be the thing that will enable Softbank to better compete with rivals NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. And, indeed, KDDI was 0.4 percent lower to ¥736,000, while NTT dropped 0.6 percent to ¥182,000 even though it launched new handsets of its own on Thursday.
In the electronics sector, Sony was hurt by yet another recall of notebook computers that use its sometimes faulty batteries. While it introduced an international replacement program for the batteries, Sony declined 0.8 percent to ¥4,780.