3 Comments

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  Statistician at 10:34 AM JST - 6th July

  I'll believe THAT when I see a Japanese corporate board dominated by foreign shareholder interests that tell management what to do..

  Basically the shareholder protection issue is a red herring because shareholders here don't have the effective powers to hold management to account anyway.

  Not saying that they necessarily should - leads to 'short-termism' in priorities - just that they don't.

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  panzerdampf at 11:14 AM JST - 6th July

  Statistician,

  Funny you should mention shareholder interests... I was just reading about Chisso using 'sokaiya' to minimize criticism (understatement) from shareholders following the Minamata contamination. Iirc, years after the cause of the disease had been discovered, a district court let them off the hook for it. So, some folks bought single shares of stock in order to gain entrance to the shareholders' meeting. This was around 1970 or so. So, the sokai was full of thoroughly pissed off Kyushu residents, and Chisso couldn't have that, so... sokaiya.

  Two interesting points in the article above: METI and poison-pill measures. The ways of MITI/METI are so ingrained, I don't think they'll ever escape it until economic collapse destroys their system and they start fresh, like the war itself (although, in Shadows of the Rising Sun, Jared Taylor wrote that MITI was actually the successor of the Ministry of Armaments, so even WWII didn't really 'reset' them the way it could have). I think it was Oji Paper that in the last 2 or 3 years resisted a takeover by Hokuetsu. They won't even have their own people taking over their companies, let alone barbarians, lulz.

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  exgeo at 12:44 PM JST - 6th July

  I've read some stuff in UK-based Moneyweek (a worthwhile general read, even if you're not investing in the UK). They are constantly pushing Japan, citing things such as many companies trading below the value of the cash on their balance sheets, or below book value (wonder what figures the book values use though, peak of the bubble asset-values?).

  Given the stiff defences put up by management to prevent takeovers at any cost, I imagine Japanese stocks will remain "cheap" for some time to come.

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