Four women in blue and red robes stand barefoot on a wooden stage in front of a carved stone relief panel, mid-sequence in an Okinawan dance. In the bottom third of the frame, a hand rises out of the dark auditorium holding a phone, and on the phone screen the same four women appear again, about three centimetres tall, lit and rendered by a computational photography pipeline that has never seen this dance before.

Japan is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities by a margin that is not particularly close. Its $1.185 trillion position as of December 2025 exceeds the United Kingdom’s second-place $866 billion by more than $300 billion, and outstrips China’s $683.5 billion by nearly half a trillion. Japan accounts for 12.8% of all foreign investment in U.S. publicly held federal debt. It has held the top position for years, interrupted only briefly during the period when China’s accumulation was at its peak.