The majority of Asian equities dropped on Friday as investors reacted to the Bank of Japan's hawkish remarks and the inconsistent Japanese inflation statistics, with the Federal Reserve Chairman's forthcoming speech taking centre stage.

Wall Street led the way weakly into the weekend, with significant overnight losses triggered by a dramatic selloff in technology companies and a recovery in Treasury rates.

Futures for the US stock index increased during Asian trading, with all eyes focused on Jerome Powell's speech in Jackson Hole later on Friday.

Powell's speech is being delivered as confidence in the Fed's September interest rate reduction grows.  However, indications of a sharply cooling labour market have heightened worries about a U.S. economic downturn, which reduced risk appetite this week.

The Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices in Japan had a little decline, indicating a mediocre conclusion to the week as the recovery from early-August deficits reached a standstill.

At a parliamentary hearing, BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda stated that interest rates need to rise more in order to attain a neutral level since he still views them as extremely low. Following the BOJ's rate rise during a meeting at the end of July, Ueda also reaffirmed his intention to boost interest rates further provided inflation stayed stable.

However, inconsistent consumer price index inflation statistics for July cast doubt on Ueda's remarks. The data indicated that rising earnings and better consumer spending caused core and headline CPI inflation to increase.

However, underlying inflation—a crucial inflation indicator for the BOJ that does not include food and energy prices—fell short of the bank's 2% annual objective.

The amount of headroom the BOJ has to continue hiking rates was called into question by the reading.

A hawkish BOJ earlier in August shook the Japanese markets, however, they recovered most of their losses the previous week.

Other Asian markets largely saw a decline, and a mediocre weekly result was anticipated as the recovery from early August's losses faltered.

Technology-heavy indices witnessed comparatively larger losses, mirroring those of their US counterparts, as investors were cautious ahead of NVIDIA's earnings, which are expected next week.

(Sources: investing.com, reuters.com)