Asian Shares Mostly Higher

An overnight pullback in the yen helped Japanese stocks rebound early Tuesday, while technology companies led broader gains in Asia.

Chinese internet heavyweight Tencent, which saw its market capitalization top $500 billion for the first time on Monday, rose 4% in early Hong Kong trading, putting its stock-market value above Facebook's and almost at Amazon.com's $543 billion. Tencent's gain helped the Hang Seng Index climb 0.9% to hit another 10-year high.

The Nikkei Stock Average rose 1%, after posting its seventh decline in nine days on Monday as the yen moved off multimonth lows. Industrial stocks including Hitachi Construction, Toyota and Komatsu led gainers in Tokyo, rising about 2% each.

The yen weakened overnight and was recently trading at Yen112.70 against the dollar, after getting a safe-haven boost Monday amid the euro's slide on German political worries.

Tech-heavy stock markets in Taiwan and Korea rose about 0.5%, while Chinese benchmark indexes posted similar gains, building on Monday's sharp rebound.

"In the absence of any material event risk to push risk assets higher this week, we are also still seeing signs of markets refusing to sell off with any real conviction," said Chris Weston, chief market strategist at IG Markets.

But New Zealand stocks ignored gains in the region, with the NZX 50 Index down 0.2% after shedding as much as 0.5% in early trade following Monday's three-week closing high.

Elsewhere, the Australian dollar hit a five-month low against the U.S. dollar after the minutes of this month's central-bank meeting showed officials are nervously watching labor markets in other economies and domestic wage growth remained weak. The S&P/ASX 200 stock index was recently up 0.3%.

Write to Kenan Machado at kenan.machado@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 20, 2017 21:59 ET (02:59 GMT)