On November 15, 2011, Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba agreed to the integration of their small and medium size liquid crystal display (LCD) panel businesses in conjunction with the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). The merged businesses will be known as Japan Display. INCJ will be the largest shareholder of Japan Display Inc., with 70% stake in exchange for a $2.6 billion investment. That leaves Toshiba, Hitachi and Sony with a 10% share each, the stakes originating from their respective small and medium-sized display subsidiaries. The new entity is expected to start operating in the spring of 2012 and expected to be the world's largest LCD maker.

Panasonic has also announced in a separate deal that it has agreed to sell a LCD panel factory to Japan Display. That plant, which is located in Mobara, currently turns out 600,000 LCD TVs a month. Japan Display is expected to take over it in April next year. The factory sale will be completed in April 2012.

Japan ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.

Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.