TOKYO: Tokyo stocks rose in early trading Monday morning, erasing opening losses following a positive lead from Wall Street.
US stocks finished solidly higher on Friday following firm US jobs and manufacturing data, but which were seen as not strong enough to spur the Federal Reserve into raising interest rates.
"Friday's US labour market report was something of a middling result for markets," Philip Borkin, a senior economist at ANZ Bank New Zealand said in a commentary, according to Bloomberg News.
"On the one hand it was not really strong enough to suggest inflation pressures are going to run away on the (Federal Reserve), but on the other, it certainly still showed... that the economy is still performing well overall."
The benchmark Nikkei 225 index at the Tokyo Stock Exchange ticked up 0.06 percent, or 10.08 points, to 16,174.24 in early trading, after losing 0.5 percent in opening deals.
The broader Topix index of all first-section shares gained 0.44 percent, or 5.76 points, to 1,307.16.
The gains came after the Nikkei on Friday tumbled 3.6 percent, closing lower for the fourth straight session after a key Bank of Japan survey showed confidence among major manufacturers dropped to its lowest level since 2013.
The US Labor Department on Friday said the world's top economy added a better-than-expected 215,000 jobs in March in a report that also showed a pickup in hourly wages.
That was followed by a report from the Institute for Supply Management showing its purchasing managers index for the manufacturing sector jumped 2.3 percentage points from February to 51.8 in March, above the threshold of 50 between growth and contraction.
In response, the dollar fell against the yen, which hits the profitability of Japan's exporters, knocking demand for their shares.
In Tokyo, the greenback fetched 111.53 yen compared with 111.63 yen in New York and 112.17 yen in Tokyo earlier Friday.
"Japanese stocks will be impacted by a stronger yen," Yoshinori Ogawa, a market strategist at Okasan Securities, told Bloomberg News.
On Wall Street, the Dow and S&P 500 closed 0.6 percent higher on Friday while the tech-rich Nasdaq climbed 0.9 percent.
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