Japan Stocks Open Strong Amid Heavy Foreign Buying

Japanese stocks rocked a sharp opening gain in early Tuesday trade, with the Nikkei Average climbing 1.2%, erasing Monday's 0.3% dip, and the Topix up 1.1% as shares rose across the board. Blue chips favored by foreign investors saw some of the strongest improvement, with Dow Jones Newswires saying the six foreign brokerages it tracks recorded their heaviest buying of the month in premarket trade. A solid advance for the dollar to 118.61 yen from �118.17 at the previous stock close also helped. Among the big names, Sony Corp. rose 2.2%, TDK Corp. gained 2.6%, Panasonic Corp. traded 2% higher, and Kyocera Corp. advanced by 2.4%. The telecoms mostly kept pace with the market (Softbank Corp. and KDDI Corp. up 1.2% each), but NTT DoCoMo Inc. rose just 0.2% after a Nikkei news report said the wireless carrier would post a 19% drop in its profit for the nine months through December as its customers took advantage of an unlimited calling plan. Steel mills enjoyed some gains on the back of another hard fall for iron-ore prices, with JFE Holdings Inc. up 4.1% and Kobe Steel Ltd. up 1.9%, but losses for crude oil weighed on the trading houses, with Mitsui & Co. down 1.8% and Marubeni Corp. down 1.7% as the Nikkei reported that trouble in Marubeni's resource business would contribute to a 2014 writedown of more than $1.3 billion.