Japan Stock Files

The paperwork of the world's politest market, read with appropriate suspicion.


Issue 78 — filed 9 September 2026 Published from Tokyo · in English
Disclosure · Fragment 02

The Companies That Do Not Exist in English

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 →
Also filed

Toyota7203 · Sony Group6758 · Nintendo7974 · Mitsubishi Heavy Industries7011 · Nippon Steel5401 · FUJIFILM Holdings4901 / Risks

What Changed in the Risk Pages

Every Japanese annual securities report carries a section headed 事業等のリスク, business and other risks, and since an …

Thirty-four large filers, June 2026 annual reports / Employment

What Japan's Biggest Companies Pay

Every Japanese listed company prints its average annual salary, average age and average length of service in its annual …

¥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.

ANNUAL PHYSICAL patient: the issuer · age 120 正常 Cash, fasting · ref 0 – 61% of mkt cap 61% Borrowings · ref 0.00 – 0.00 0.00 Pulse, at AGM · ref 10 – 12 bpm 11 FINDINGS no expenditure since 1997. constitutional. recheck in 12 mo.
Fig. — Every value falls inside the reference range. The reference range was fitted to the patient.
Daily

One fragment, 08:00 Tokyo

Each morning one piece is read out of a primary filing — an annual securities report, a large-shareholding report, a monthly buyback return — checked against the document before it is published, and corrected in public when it is wrong.

Series

The People Pages

Whose pay is it, and what was promised? The employee table and the indicators-and-targets pages of the annual report, read company by company.

Dataset

Buyback returns

What 318 Japanese companies actually bought back in July 2026, against what their boards authorised. Reconciliation-checked, free to download, CC BY 4.0.

Filed

Every fragment, by company and by subject

The full run, newest first, filterable by the company under discussion and by subject.

Following the desk Form 1

No mailing list is kept and no address is collected. One fragment is filed each morning at 08:00 Tokyo; the feed carries each one as it is filed.

Atom feed · Every fragment