The paperwork of the world's politest market, read with appropriate suspicion.
Tokyo made English disclosure compulsory for roughly 1,600 Prime-listed domestic companies, and self-reported implementation reached 99.6 percent. The interesting numbers are on the other side of the boundary.
Read the fragment →¥366.7 trillion — about $2.24 trillion — sits in the bank accounts of Japanese companies that have no particular plans for it — an all-time high, as of March 2026. The last time the Tokyo Stock Exchange counted in public, 922 companies on its top tier — half of them — were trading below the value of the assets on their own balance sheets. Both facts are disclosed in full, on time, to the letter of the law — in Japanese, in a filing system most of the world's money has never opened.
This letter opens it.
We read the annual reports, the earnings releases, the large-holding disclosures and the trade press, and we write down in English what they actually say. The interesting part is rarely the number. It is the sentence on page 47 that the company was obliged to include and hoped you would not translate.
No ratings. No target prices. No recommendations — not as modesty, but as policy. If you cannot tell what the desk thinks by the end of a note, read it again.
Everything filed last week that mattered, and the two or three things that will. Short, and on time, because that is the entire promise.
When a thing is worth three thousand words — a company nobody covers, a rule change nobody read, a habit of corporate Japan that stopped making sense in 1997 and continues anyway.
One page per listed company, all ~3,900 of them, built from the filings and rewritten by the machine each time the company files. Facts only; what the desk makes of them lives in the fragments.