Four Spellings of Nothing

Pigeon Corporation's confirmation letter runs two pages. A cover, then １【半期報告書の記載内容の適正性に関する事項】, then ２【特記事項】. On the cover the representative appears under the printed title 代表取締役社長, and the field headed 【最高財務責任者の役職氏名】 — title and name of the chief financial officer — carries a title ending in （CFO） and a name. The body is two sentences. The first says the semiannual report beside it is properly stated under the financial instruments law. The second, under section 2, is 「特記すべき事項はありません。」 — there are no matters that should be specially noted.

This is the 確認書, and its first heading names what it confirms. Across the 198 documents on EDINET's list for 3 to 7 August 2026 — every filing under docTypeCode 135 for those five list dates — that heading reads 半期報告書 181 times and 有価証券報告書 17 times. The 198 do not sit evenly across the week: 10 on the 3rd, 9 on the 4th, 18 on the 5th, 34 on the 6th, and 127 on the 7th.

The covers cite the statute to match. The 181 cite Article 24-5-2(1), 172 of them printing 第24条の５の２第１項 and nine printing 第24条の5の2第1項. The 17 cite Article 24-4-2, sixteen of them paragraph 4 and one paragraph 1. Width varies inside a single citation as well: in 第24条の５の２第１項 the 24 is half-width and the ５, ２ and １ are not. Worth noticing this early, because it comes back.

List date and filing date are not the same thing, which matters exactly once here. Five of the 198 print 2026年７月30日 as their filing date and turn up on the 3 August list, and those same five are the ones EDINET's header band labels 訂正確認書 — above a 【提出書類】 field that reads 確認書, as it does on all 198. All five come from Premier Anti-Aging Co., Ltd. (4934), which is one way of noticing that 198 documents are 187 issuers. Where this piece says the week, it means the list.

Nineteen of the 198 confirm an amendment rather than a report: the sentence under the first heading says 訂正報告書. The heading above it reads the same either way, which is why the split does not show in the 181 and the 17. Sixteen of the nineteen sit inside the seventeen with the annual heading and three under a semiannual one, which leaves a single confirmation of an original annual securities report in the whole set, filed by SATUDORA HOLDINGS CO.,LTD. (3544) — a name given here in half-width letters and set in its own 【英訳名】 field in full-width ones, ＳＡＴＵＤＯＲＡ　ＨＯＬＤＩＮＧＳ　ＣＯ．，ＬＴＤ. with a half-width period at the end.

In all 198, section 2 says there is nothing. Not nearly all, not all but a handful. The count of filings that used section 2 to record a matter is zero. That figure, and the wording counts that follow, come from a machine reading of the 【特記事項】 field in all 198 documents; the individual filings named in this piece were opened and read.

Zero was not the first answer. The section number is a full-width ２ in 193 of them and a half-width 2 in five, and a first pass keyed on the full-width character alone. It missed those five, and the five came back as a small nonzero — a result to the effect that somebody out there had written something else. Reading both widths and counting again gives 198 and 0. A check built the same way loses the same five in the same place.

With the content settled, what is left to count is the wording, and the wording splits four ways. 「確認に当たり、特記すべき事項はありません。」 — in conducting the confirmation, there are no matters that should be specially noted — appears 103 times. 「特記すべき事項はありません。」, the same sentence without the opening clause, appears 89 times. 「確認にあたり、特記すべき事項はありません。」, identical to the first except that あたり is written in kana rather than as 当たり, appears 4 times. 「特記事項はありません。」, which uses the section heading's own noun phrase, appears twice. 103 + 89 + 4 + 2 = 198.

Those four resolve into two axes. One is whether the sentence opens by naming the act it is reporting on: 103 + 4 = 107 filings say in conducting the confirmation and 89 + 2 = 91 do not, which is 107 ÷ 198 = 54.0% against 46.0%. The other is which noun the sentence denies: 103 + 89 + 4 = 196 filings, or 99.0%, use 特記すべき事項, matters that should be specially noted, and 2 use 特記事項, the heading's own term. The kana-versus-kanji difference in あたり is not a third axis; it is orthography inside the first one, and it runs 103 to 4.

What the counts cannot do is say why the wording splits where it does. Candidates are easy to name — the drafting company, an outside filing agent, the software that builds the XBRL package, a form carried forward from the previous period — but those are examples rather than findings, and a tally of sentences does not tell them apart. So the 54/46 division is a fact about the text of 198 documents on one week's list, and on this evidence it is a fact about that and no more.

The same machine pass reads the cover, where there is a second kind of variation. The field headed 【最高財務責任者の役職氏名】 holds 該当事項はありません, no applicable item, in 98 of the 198. That is 98 ÷ 198 = 49.5%. Even that is two spellings: 95 close with 。 and three do not. In just under half the week's covers, that phrase is the entire contents of the field.

The other 100 fall out of the same pass. Eighty-seven carry a title and a name, and the strings run from one rank to several: Pigeon's is グループ執行役員財務戦略統括責任者（CFO）, one string, then a name; SIIX Corp.'s (7613) runs ＣＦＯ, then 取締役, then 常務執行役員, then 財務経理部長 兼 ＩＲ・広報部長, then a name. Of the 87, 36 contain the letters CFO — 26 in half-width Latin, ten as full-width ＣＦＯ. Ten hold a dash, and the dash is not one character: five are 「―」 and five are 「－」, PILOT CORPORATION (7846) taking the first and TOKYO SOIR CO.,LTD. (8040) the second in the same field of the same form. Three hold a different absence phrase altogether — 該当はありません at YAMAZAKI BAKING CO., LTD. (2212), 該当する事項はない。 at KOKUYO CO., LTD. (7984), 該当事項なし。 at RYOBI LIMITED (5851).

So the form holds more than one kind of nothing. In section 2 it comes in four spellings and accounts for all 198. On the cover it comes in four phrases, one of them in two spellings, plus two dash characters. Section 2's nothing is a sentence; the cover's is sometimes a sentence and sometimes a mark.

Set the two most common section-2 wordings against the four kinds of cover entry and all eight cells are occupied. The long wording sits above 46 covers with a title and a name, 47 with 該当事項はありません, nine with a dash and one with another absence phrase; the short wording sits above 38, 49, one and one. Eight cells, none of them empty, which is as much as the pairing supports: neither field's answer decides the other's.

The covers vary below the level of the word as well. The month and day run in full-width digits on 180 covers and in half-width digits on 13; on five the month is full-width and the day is not, and those five are the ones dated ７月30日. The year is half-width on all 197 covers that write 2026, and the one that does not — Taki Chemical Co.,Ltd.'s (4025), dated 令和８年８月７日 — is full-width throughout.

The company's own name varies the same way. Eleven of the 198 【英訳名】 fields are set in full-width Latin letters, and one of the eleven changes width inside a word: MUGEN ESTATE Co.,Ltd. (3299) prints ＭＵＧＥＮ ＥＳＴＡＴＥ Ｃo.,Ｌtd., a full-width Ｃ followed by a half-width o, a full-width Ｌ followed by half-width td. Company names in this piece are set in half-width letters, and Pigeon's, whose field prints PIGEON CORPORATION, in mixed case; both are decisions made here about legibility rather than anything the fields did. None of it changes what section 2 denies.

It is worth being clear about proportion. Pigeon's runs two pages and contains two sentences, and across the 198 the one open slot held the same class of sentence every time, differing in how it was spelled. That is a small document, and it deserves a small number of paragraphs, which is what it is getting. It is written up for what the shape implies about reading the next 198. The report each letter points to is a separate document, and nothing here is a reading of that report.

The shape implies a cheap detector. Section 1 carries the confirmation, section 2 stands under the heading 特記事項, and 198 consecutive documents put the same class of sentence under it. A machine reading section 2 across every 確認書 as it arrives is therefore a binary channel: it returns nothing, nothing, nothing, and the day it returns text, that text is the whole signal. The cost of running it is the cost of parsing two pages. The failure mode is documented above, in full-width and half-width digits.

The cover field moves on a different clock, or at any rate it is the field that could. Whether 【最高財務責任者の役職氏名】 carries a name, a dash, 該当事項はありません or one of the three variants is a fact about the document in front of you, and this count covers one list week. The same field in an earlier or a later window was not read here, so whether it moves, and on what schedule, is outside what these counts reach. What they give is the split at this window: 98, 87, 10, 3.

What five business days cannot tell you is the year. The window is dominated by semiannual reports, 181 of 198, and the annual heading covers 17, sixteen of which confirm an amendment rather than an original report. A week drawn from a different part of the filing calendar would mix them differently. Whether the 103/89/4/2 split holds at that different mix, and whether zero holds over a longer run, are questions these counts do not reach. The zero here belongs to 198 documents on one week's list and nothing wider.

Which leaves the document as it is: a cover, a sentence confirming that the report next to it is properly stated, and a section headed 特記事項. In the week counted here, 198 times, what stood under that heading was a sentence saying there was nothing to note — 103 times one way, 89 another, four with the kana, and twice using the heading's own words.

Currency note: this publication converts yen amounts at ¥163.8 = US$1 (the rate retrieved on 24 July 2026; that dated series returns 163.82 for it), applied as a single rate across all periods and all figures, with each converted figure carried to the significant figures of the yen amount it comes from. No yen amount appears above, so no conversion appears above.