On February 25, 2020, in the second year of the Reiwa era, the Intellectual Property High Court of Japan (IPHCJ) issued two appellate decisions relating to the groundbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning, genome-editing technology, CRISPR. This article will outline the IPHCJ decisions' interpretative scope of the Japanese patent law novelty bar (secret prior art) where an earlier-filed, but subsequently published, patent application is regarded as prior art against a later-filed patent application. This analysis is topical in view of the vigorous first-to-file patent filing race amongst various CRISPR research and commercial interests, since Japan is one of the world's most important biotech and health care markets. The article will also provide a snapshot review of CRISPR, university-related biotech start-ups, and biotechnology in Japan during the global COVID-19 pandemic.