The selling in Japan’s $7.6 trillion bond market began slowly, then seemed to hit all at once.

Mizuho Financial Group Inc. is bolstering efforts to expand its corporate and institutional banking business in Europe and Asia, pursuing a growth strategy that’s diverging from its Japanese peers.

Junichi Hanzawa, the next chief executive officer of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., will take the reins of Japan’s largest bank as it rakes in record profits. His challenge will be sustaining that growth beyond the windfall of rising interest rates.

Mizuho Financial Group Inc.’s chief executive officer expressed optimism that momentum in investment banking will continue both at home and in the US, where Japan’s third-biggest lender has been expanding.

Three decades after a bad debt crisis in Japan forced a wave of mergers that created its mega lenders, the focus now is on consolidation in the nation’s $3 trillion regional banking industry.