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I frequently use Japanese-language sources to dothis type of research for clients. In my experience, analmost-overwhelming amount of company informa-tion is available in the local language, especially onpublicly traded firms. Surely, with Japan as one of thetop economies in the world, database providers inthe West should be able to tap into such abundantresources and provide researchers with the qualityinformation they need for solid research on Japan-ese companies.

Armed with passwords from a few friendly vendors,I decided to see what is readily available to informationprofessionals and what is hidden away behind theimpenetrable bamboo fence of language and culturethat sometimes seems to separate Japan from the restof the world.

To test available sources, I first selected 10 publiclytraded and 10 privately held Japanese companies, pick-ing the public firms at random from those listed in thesecond section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. This sec-tion includes smaller companies that do not get thesame attention as well-known names such as Toyota,

www.infotoday.com/searcher April 35

by Tom ListerPresident

Data Meridian Research Inc.

Behind a Bamboo Fence?

On a number of occasions, I have heard fellowinformation professionals complain about thedifficulties in researching small and medium-sized Japanese companies. Common gripesare aimed at out-of-date, contradictory, andinaccurate data. Sometimes finding anythingbeyond the basics becomes a challenge.

Evaluating Sources of Japanese

Company Information

36 SEARCHER: The Magazine for Database Professionals


Google Finance [http://www.finance.google.com/finance]

EDINET (Electronic Disclosure for Investors’ NETwork)[http://info.edinet.go.jp]

Mizuho Securities — Japanese listed companies [www.mizuho-sc.com/english/ebond/companies/list.html]

Bureau van Dijk’s JADE database[http://www.bvdep.com/en/JADE.html]

Nikkei Telecom 21 [http://telecom21.nikkei.co.jp/nt21/service/]

Sony, and Matsushita. I chose these companies pre-cisely for this reason. Any publisher can copy informa-tion from Toyota’s English-language filings into its data-base, but it becomes more difficult to maintain dataquality for companies that only release information inJapanese. The test group contained public companiesin various fields, including sushi restaurants, bicycles,metal can manufacturing, scaffolding, and flourmilling. Annual revenues ranged from $35 million to$343 million.

I also chose 10 private companies from a list of com-panies that participated in the last annual Foodex tradeshow in Japan. These firms are all engaged in the whole-sale or retail sale of food or beverages. Annual sales forthe companies in this group ranged from $11 millionto $381 million.

With this list of companies in hand, I put myself inthe shoes of a monolingual researcher and looked atwhat appeared in English on the big three aggregators(Dialog, Factiva, and LexisNexis) as well as Alacra,Hoover’s, JADE from Bureau van Dijk, and Mergent.

I evaluated these sources to determine whetherthey could help researchers answer questions such asthe following: • Where is the company located?• What line of business is it in? • When was it founded?• How big is it (in terms of number of employees and

revenue)?• How is it doing financially?• Who owns the company? Do the shareholders have

any connection to the firm?• Are there any subsidiaries? If so, what do they do?• Who runs the company and what is their back-

ground? Do they own any shares of company stock?Has there been any recent coverage of the company

in the business or trade press? I compared my results to those from authoritative

Japanese-language sources, such as the company’s ownannual securities reports (the yuho filings in the Japan-ese Companies 101 sidebar on pp. 42–44), fee-basedJapanese databases, and the company’s own Web site.

Getting the Name RightMy first task was to make sure that I had the right

company names. Japanese company names can be con-fusing, and it is surprisingly easy to waste a substantialamount of time researching the wrong company.

All publicly traded and many privately held Japan-ese companies have an official English name. In thecase of publicly traded companies, this name willappear in their articles of incorporation and yuho fil-ings. The name is usually a transliteration or transla-

tion of their Japanese company name into English. Insome cases, it may be something completely different.For example, the official Japanese name of one of Toy-ota’s affiliates is Aishin Seiki KK (seiki means “precisionmachinery”). Its English company name is much thesame as its Japanese name: Aishin Seiki Co. Ltd. Othercompanies that use the word seiki in their name dothings differently. Chuo Seiki’s English name is ChuoPrecision Industrial; Eiko Seiki goes by Eiko Instru-ments; and Taiyo Seiki calls itself Horizon International.

Things can get really interesting when looking atfirms that emerged from the zaibatsu, or family-con-trolled conglomerates, that dominated the Japaneseeconomy before the World War II. These are sometimescalled keiretsu companies and carry familiar namessuch as Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, and Mitsui. Looking forinformation on Mitsui, for example, is a very tall order,when you consider that the Japanese version of TeikokuDatabank’s database of company information containsmore than 500 firms that use the word Mitsui in thename. The database also includes almost 400 compa-nies that use the word Mitsubishi and almost 200 withSumitomo.

When doing private company research, researchersmay need more than just the name, since numeroussmall companies in Japan have the same name. Thiswas the case with two of the private companies in thetest group. Teikoku Databank’s Japan Companies data-base on Dialog (File 502) listed 20 identical companiesfor one test name and 15 for the other. I needed to useaddress information found on company Web sites tonarrow searches down to the right company.

Free Sources of InformationBefore turning to the various aggregators, let’s look

at a few of the free sources of information in this area.

Google Financehttp://www.finance.google.com/finance

Though still in beta, this is still a good source forbasic information on public Japanese companies.Google combines information gleaned by its Webcrawlers with content from a number of commercialsources, such as Hoover’s and Reuters. All 10 publiccompanies in my test set were covered. Each com-pany’s page was divided into the following sections:Summary, Key Stats & Ratios, Related Companies,News, and Management. The company descriptionand list of executives come from Reuters and provedgenerally accurate.

Clicking on news articles (also from Reuters) proveddisappointing, though. In almost all cases, there wasno actual story behind the link or only a portion of the



lead paragraph appeared (often cut off in the middle ofa word). The Related Companies section also failed tobe particularly useful. It does not list companies relatedto one another in a corporate or competitive sense, but,according to the Google Finance FAQ, derives fromalgorithmically determined content collection “basedon our Web search results, news items and othersources.” Google encourages us to use its search engine“to learn more about the relationships between com-panies listed in the Related Companies feature.”

Mizuho Securitieshttp://www.mizuho-sc.com/english/ebond/companies/list.html

This Japanese stockbroker’s site provides a numberof free resources for public companies. These includelinks to its English-language Web sites as well as lists offirms by four-digit stock code and English name (takendirectly from their articles of incorporation).

Japan Company Web sitehttp://www.japancompany.info

Roderick H. Seeman runs this free source. The siteprovides free machine translations of the financialstatements of Japanese companies that file yuhoreports under the Securities and Exchange Law (see theDisclosure Requirements in the Japanese Companies101 sidebar). The “Company Names” spreadsheet con-tains the English and Japanese names, stock codes, andEDINET numbers (similar to the Central Index Keysused by the U.S. SEC) for more than 5,000 companies.

Company Web SitesA company’s own Web site is usually a key source of

information on its business and products. Finding pub-lic company URLs is straightforward; both the JapanCompany Handbook and Google Finance providelinks. Locating the Internet home of the private com-panies in my test group using only English-languageresources proved more challenging. While I eventuallyfound the correct sites, in a number of cases I had tovisit more than a few unrelated companies before Ifound the one I sought, highlighting the problem dis-cussed already of similar company names.

Unfortunately, while all 20 companies had corpo-rate Web sites, only two of the public companies andthree of the private companies had any content in Eng-lish. Even in those cases, the information available inEnglish represented only a fraction of that available inJapanese. Tools such as Babel Fish [http://babelfish.altavista.com] and Google Translate [http://translate.google.com] can help one understand the Japanesecontent on these sites. Though sometimes the transla-tions were downright laughable, I did use these tools

to eventually determine enough of the address of a cou-ple of the private companies to find the right recordsfor them in the databases listed below. Some of theproblems encountered when using these machinetranslation tools are discussed in a previous article Iwrote for this publication (“Repealing Murphy’s Law,”Searcher, January 2007, pp. 14+).

LexisNexisOf the big three aggregators, LexisNexis has the best

coverage of public Japanese companies. Table 1, Japan-ese Company Research Resources on LexisNexis (seepage 39), lists the relevant databases and the resultsobtained using the test group of 10 small publiclytraded companies, most all of which appeared in thedatabases.

Despite the out-of-date and incomplete informa-tion encountered in some sources, one can use thesefiles to create the beginnings of a solid company pro-file by carefully stitching together information frommultiple sources. For the companies in my test group,I combined the following information from the follow-ing sources:• Contact information: Japan Company Handbook or

Teikoku Databank• Company description: Japan Company Handbook

and Market Guide Market Company Profiles• Detailed financials: International Institutional Data-

base or Worldscope• Shareholders: Japan Company Handbook• Names of executives: Market Guide Market Com-

pany Profiles• Home address and phone number of CEO: Teikoku

Databank• Credit rating and domestic sales ranking: Teikoku

Databank• Banking relationships: Teikoku Databank

Two of the databases on LexisNexis stand out whenit comes to Japanese company research: Toyo Keizai’sJapan Company Handbook and Teikoku Databank’sJapanese Companies file.

Japan Company HandbookThe Japan Company Handbook (JCH) [http://www.

toyokeizai.co.jp/english/jch/index.html] provides qual-ity information on publicly traded Japanese companies.You can use it to check English company names, findcorporate Web sites, and determine the company’sfinancial health. This publication is available both inprint (two volumes, updated quarterly) and on Lexis-Nexis. The JCH contains information on all public com-



panies in Japan except those that trade on the GreenSheets market (see Japanese Companies 101, p. 42). Thelatest version (Winter 2006) covered 3,845 companies.

Information in the JCH comes from Toyo Keizai’sJapanese-language Kaisha Shikiho (Corporate Quar-terly Handbook). Japanese investors use this bookextensively to pick stocks. You can see it stacked highin Japanese bookstores each quarter when the new edi-tion is released. The English version provides the sameaccurate and up-to-date information on listed Japan-ese companies. In my test, the JCH and Teikoku’s data-base were the only English-language sources thatshowed that a new CEO had taken over at one of thecompanies in the test group.

While much of the information in the JCH focuseson the needs of investors, the JCH does include gooddescriptions of company operations, sales by businesssegment, analyses of future prospects, lists of the top10 shareholders, names of CEOs, and full contact infor-mation, including URLs for company Web sites.

Teikoku Databank: Japanese Companies

The Teikoku Databank: Japanese Companies data-base (available on LexisNexis, Dialog, and JADE fromBureau van Dijk) is an up-to-date source of informationon both public and private Japanese companies. Itincludes information on more than 220,000 companies,



Table 1. Japanese Company Research Resources on LexisNexis

Database Comments

Japan Company Handbook Described separately.

Teikoku Databank Japan Companies Described separately.

International InstitutionalDatabase (CoreData Inc.)

Excellent source of current financial data and ratios (consolidated basis, local currency,last 3 years); contact information correct; no SIC codes or company description; missing one of the test companies.

Market Guide Company Profiles Good description of company operations with both SIC and NAICS codes; most extensive list of executives with a few transliteration errors; some errors in contact information.

Worldscope International Company Profiles

Excellent source of current financial data and ratios (both consolidated and unconsolidated,local currency, last 3 years); description of company’s operations with SIC codes; two or threetop executives; shareholder information not current.

Nelson’s Public Company Profiles Company description, SIC codes, and executives same as Worldscope; sales/income/EPS datafor last 8 years; currency incorrectly labeled as US$ (actually yen); no indication what “currentyear” is; information on exchanges not current.

Major Companies Database (Graham & Whiteside Ltd.)

Description of business with SIC codes; brief financials; chief executives; information share-holders with at least 5 percent ownership.

Company Briefs (Gale Group) Information same as Major Companies Database with 6 years of sales data (US$).

Company IntelligenceInternational (Gale Group)

Brief profile (same as Major Companies Database) combined with recent news articles; no relevant news found for any of the companies in test group; also on Dialog (File 479).

Dun’s Non-U.S. Market Identifiers(D&B)

Contact information; chief executive; short description of business with SIC codes; brief financials (not always current); information on subsidiaries sometimes incorrect (see section on corporate family trees); also on Dialog (File 518).

Directory of Corporate Affiliations Not recommended for Japanese company research (see section on corporate family trees); also on Dialog (File 513).

infoUSA idEXEC Directory Not recommended for Japanese company research; information not current; numerous transliteration errors.

FBR Asian Company Profiles (Asian Company Profiles Ltd.)

Not recommended for Japanese company research; limited information in record; financial information at least 2 years old; also on Dialog (File 505); missing two companies from test group.

with detailed financials for close to 100,000. TeikokuDatabank is the leading credit bureau in Japan, main-taining credit information on more than 1.23 millionJapanese companies. Its team of 1,500 investigatorsconducts in-person interviews with company manage-ment. All 20 of my test companies were listed in the Eng-lish-language Teikoku Databank file. In addition, it pro-vided detailed financials for all 10 of the public and sixof the private companies.

A basic Teikoku record includes contact informa-tion, date of establishment and incorporation, numberof employees and shareholders, paid-in capital, pri-mary and secondary classifications using TeikokuIndustry Classification (TIC) codes, banking relation-ships, financial summary (sales, profits, dividends, networth, and availability of detailed financials), credit rat-ing, sales ranking, and CEO information.

It does, however, have a few limitations:• Financial information is shown on an unconsoli-

dated (parent only) rather than a consolidated (par-ents and subsidiaries) basis. As the example inJapanese Companies 101 (see page 42) shows, therecan be a significant difference between the two.

• There is no information on shareholders or manage-ment other than the CEO, although the record oftenincludes his or her home address, telephone num-ber, alma mater, and prefecture of origin.

• Teikoku uses its own industry classification systemrather than SIC or NAICS codes.

• There is no corporate family tree information.

JADE from Bureau van Dijk [http://www.bvdep.com/en/JADE.html] is a value-added version of Teikoku’sEnglish-language database. It overcomes some of thepreviously listed limitations: Lists of companies can begenerated using more familiar industry classificationsystems (SIC, NAICS, and NACE) and detailed financialsare usually provided on a consolidated basis, in keep-ing with current accounting practices. Bureau van Dijkalso adds shareholder and subsidiary information to therecords for some of the larger Japanese companies. Ifound limited information for the public companies inmy test group. With its powerful search and flexible out-put options, JADE should have particular interest forresearchers who need to generate extensive lists ofJapanese companies in certain industry sectors.

I frequently use the Japanese-language Teikokudatabase for information that does not appear in theEnglish-language version. This includes key sharehold-ers, main customers and suppliers, and a full list of cor-porate directors. There is a practical reason why thisinformation is not available in English. As discussed inthe sidebar, Japanese names use kanji characters thatcan often be read in several different ways. Confirming

the correct English spelling of all shareholder, cus-tomer, and supplier names in the database would be atruly Herculean task. Other publishers seem to dealwith this problem by just guessing at the reading, whichresults in the transliteration errors encountered insome of the databases tested.

DialogDialog’s sources for Japanese company research are

all conveniently contained within the JAPANCO One-Search Category. This category allows searching acrossthe Directory of Corporate Affiliations, Dun’s Interna-tional Market Identifiers (D&B), Extel Financial Cards,Gale Group Company Intelligence, and Teikoku Data-bank Japanese Companies. Although less reliable forJapanese companies, you can also search other Asiancompany directories on Dialog, specifically KompassAsia/Pacific (File 592) and Asian Company Profiles(File 505).

Dialog’s version of the Teikoku file has a particularlyuseful field. The RC field contains the Romanized ver-sion of the company name. For example, Sony is SoniKK, Toyota Motor Corporation is Toyota Jidosha KK,and Japan Airlines is Nihonkoku KK. If the companylacks an official English name, the contents of both theRC and the CO fields will be the same with an asteriskafter the name in the CO field as an indicator. Thisinformation can prove helpful. For example, I haveseen records in the JAPIO database of unexaminedJapanese patent applications (File 347) that use a com-pany’s English name in some cases and its Japanesename in others. Without knowing the name of the com-pany in Japanese, you would have a hard time figuringout that these records all relate to the same company.

FactivaFactiva’s Companies and Executives product can

generate high-quality reports on publicly traded Japan-ese companies. It combines articles from Factiva’s newsdatabase with information from Reuters (companydescription, executives, and financials) and D&B (fam-ily tree information). One warning. While D&B proba-bly supplies the best available resource in English forJapanese corporate affiliations, only use it as a startingpoint for this type of information. I discuss this topiclater in this article.

Factiva is the only one of the big three aggregatorsto have Japanese articles on its system, although it lacksaccess to the well-respected Nikkei publications (fournewspapers and dozens of industry magazines) and theAsahi Shimbun (large daily newspaper). In my testing,the vast majority of news articles pulled into the reports



were in Japanese and relevant to the company in ques-tion. In one case, a number of false drops occurred dueto an indexing error on two similar Japanese words. Youcan copy the text of these Japanese language articlesinto the “Translate Text” box of Google Translate[http://translate.google.com/translate_t] for a roughidea of their content.

Reuters also offers a key source of information forFactiva’s Japanese company reports. I asked Factivawhether the recently announced buyout by Dow Jonesof Reuters’s stake in the company would affect futureaccess to this information. I was assured that Reuterswill continue to provide current content to Factiva untilat least mid-2010.

Other Fee-Based SourcesMergent Onlinehttp://www.mergentonline.com/

This well-known resource covers public companies.Its database contains detailed information on allaspects of a company’s operations, including execu-tives, subsidiaries, property owned, and stock price his-tory. It has powerful search and output capabilities anddeep archives of financial data easily downloadableinto a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Access to thiswealth of information seems to come at the price ofcurrency and completeness, however. Only eight of the10 public companies in the test group were in Mergent’sdatabase, and financial data was at least 1 fiscal yearbehind other sources in all cases. Information on exec-utives was also out-of-date and details on sharehold-ers and subsidiaries incomplete.

Hoover’shttp://www.hoovers.com/

I turned to this familiar source hopefully. I useHoover’s service for company research and find itscomprehensive profiles a great way to get up to speedon a company of interest. Unfortunately, Hoover’s cov-erage does not extend to smaller Japanese companies.Only basic profiles containing information from Dun& Bradstreet (its parent company) appeared for thecompanies in my test group. The information wasessentially the same as that contained in Dun’s Inter-national Market Identifiers, available on LexisNexis andDialog, namely, contact information, line of business,annual sales, employees, key executive, and primarySIC/NAICS codes.

Alacrahttp://www.alacra.com/

Alacra proved a pleasant surprise. While its files dooverlap with some of the other aggregators covered in

this article, the company provides access to a numberof unique sources otherwise only available on expen-sive platforms used in the financial community. Manyof these contain data useful for international com-pany research. For example, Thomson Ownershipprovides detailed information on both individual andinstitutional shareholders and is an alternative tothe Japan Company Handbook for this type of data.Another source that focuses entirely on Japan isNikkei’s corporate financial statement database,which contains annual and interim financials (bothunconsolidated and consolidated) for more than3,200 public companies.

If you like Excel, you’ll love Alacra. Most of its reportsare delivered in this format for easy manipulation orintegration into a larger project. Subscribers haveaccess to all premium content, and nonsubscribers canbuy some reports on a transactional basis from theAlacra Store [http://www.alacrastore.com].

Corporate Family Trees and Shareholders

My testing indicates that both Dun & BradstreetFamily Tree information (available through variousaggregators) and the Directory of Corporate Affiliations(LexisNexis and File 513 on Dialog) are only startingpoints when it comes to getting a handle on the sub-sidiaries and parents of Japanese companies.

In the case of D&B, while I could find subsidiaryinformation for all 10 of the public companies tested,information for six of the companies differed fromauthoritative Japanese sources, such as the company’sown filings with the Ministry of Finance and ToyoKeizai’s Japanese-language database of corporate affil-iations. In some cases, D&B failed to list subsidiariesthat the company shows in its yuho filing; in othercases, it listed subsidiaries that no longer existed or thatdo not appear at all in the company’s filings.

The Directory of Corporate Affiliations (DCA) faredeven worse. Only one of the companies was listed inthe DCA database on LexisNexis and Dialog, and thesubsidiary indicated for this company appears to beincorrect. The Japanese-language Web site of this firmstates that its parent is an unrelated company with asimilar name. Two of the private companies were listedin the DCA databases, but, again, the information givendid not match trusted Japanese sources.

Wondering whether this problem had something todo with the size of the companies in my test group, Ialso checked these databases against the yuho filingsof a few larger Japanese companies. The results were



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Types of Business EntitiesThe dominant form of incorporated company in Japan is the

kabushiki kaisha (KK), or joint stock company. Yugen gaisha(typically abbreviated as YK not YG), or limited-liability compa-nies, may also be encountered. All public companies arekabushiki kaisha. The yugen gaisha form of incorporation istraditionally used for smaller organizations unable to come upwith the paid-in capital needed to form a kabushiki kaisha orunwilling to deal with the extra procedures needed to run one.

The Company Law that came into effect in April 2006 abol-ished the yugen gaishi form. Although it prohibits the creationof additional yugen gaisha, it allows existing companies to main-tain their status. This new law also removed the paid-in capi-tal requirement for kabushiki kaisha and created LLC (limitedliability corporation) and LLP (limited liability partnership) formsof organization.

Publicly Traded or Listed CompaniesThere are more than 3,900 public companies in Japan;

approximately 2,400 of which trade on the Tokyo StockExchange (TSE) [http://www.tse.or.jp/english/index.shtml]. TheTSE is the largest stock exchange in Japan (and in Asia) fol-lowed by the Osaka [http://www.ose.or.jp/e] and Nagoya[http://www.nse.or.jp/e/index.html] exchanges. There are alsosmaller regional exchanges in Sapporo (northern Japan) andFukuoka (southern Japan). The TSE accounts for approximately90 percent of total trading volume in the country. Companiesmay trade on more than one exchange, especially if their rootsare from outside the Tokyo metropolitan area.

The Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya exchanges are all divided intofirst and second sections, with companies moving up to the firstsection as they grow in size. The TSE has a special section calledMothers (Market of the High Growth and Emerging Stocks) fornewer, venture-type companies. Each of the other four exchangeshas a similar market with less-stringent listing requirements forthese early-stage companies.

Stocks are also traded over the counter on the JASDAQ mar-ket. JASDAQ is not the Japanese version of U.S. NASDAQ mar-ket. Instead, the Hercules section of the Osaka Stock Exchangeis the successor to NASDAQ Japan, a joint venture betweenNASDAQ and Softbank that lasted from 2000 to 2002.

If reaching the first section of the TSE is the top rung of theladder for Japanese public companies, then the companies that

trade on the Green Sheets (the Japanese version of the U.S.Pink Sheets) fall at the bottom. This market is run by the JapanSecurities Dealers Association [http://www.jsda.or.jp/html/greensheet] and includes approximately 100 companies that eithercannot meet the listing requirements of one of the other mar-kets described above or have been delisted from another mar-ket. Companies that have fallen from grace are optimisticallyreferred to as “Phoenix” listings in the Green Sheets.

Disclosure RequirementsJapanese companies are required to disclose information on

their financial results and operations under various laws and reg-ulations, including the Commercial Code, Securities andExchange Law, and the new Company Law. Stock exchanges alsohave separate disclosure requirements for listed companies.

As with most countries, these disclosure requirements meanthat you can find considerably more information on publiclytraded firms than private. The most detailed informationappears in the Annual (Yuuka Shouken Houkokusho) and Semi-annual Securities Reports (Hanki Houkokusho) that all publiccompanies submit to the Ministry of Finance. These reports(often referred to as yuho filings) are similar in nature andscope to 10-K filings in the United States. While the term yuhois sometimes translated as “annual report,” this is misleading,as many Japanese companies also publish annual reports inJapanese and English. The latter are usually glossy brochures(or PDF files) that contain only some of the information in acompany’s yuho filings.

The Securities and Exchange Law requires companies to fileno later than 3 months after the end of the company’s fiscalyear. This requirement applies to all publicly traded compa-nies (both on exchanges and over the counter) that have fileda Securities Registration Statement or have more than 500shareholders. You can thus obtain detailed information on cer-tain large privately held companies, such as Suntory and FujiXerox, from yuho filings.

In the past, these filings were only released in paper formatand cost a lot. The Financial Services Agency of the JapaneseGovernment now runs a system called EDINET (Electronic Dis-closure for Investors’ NETwork) [http://info.edinet.go.jp] that issimilar to the U.S. SEC’s EDGAR service. It went live in 2001and became mandatory for publicly traded companies from June2004. All information on the system is in Japanese. Many com-

Japanese Companies 101

panies also put their annual and semiannual filings into theInvestor Relations section on their Web sites.

Yuho filings generally run at least 100 pages in length, withsome even longer. (The latest annual filing from Toyota MotorCorporation and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group were 175pages and 284 pages, respectively.) These filings are rarelyavailable in English, due to the costs involved with translatingdocuments of this length and complexity.

I find a number of sections useful for Japanese companyresearch: the detailed corporate history; information on direc-tors and key executives; lists of top shareholders, customers,and suppliers; discussions of risk and challenges facing thebusiness; details on related party transactions; and details onrelated companies, including subsidiaries and affiliated firms.The company history section usually lists mergers, acquisi-tions, name changes, and the opening and closing of key pro-duction facilities. Information on directors and executives typ-ically includes date of birth, educational background, andpositions held within the company since joining it. The sec-tion on related companies and subsidiaries is the key to under-standing how the various parts of a far-flung corporate empirefit together. Diagrams often show the ties between the vari-ous entities that make up a consolidated company. (I havewritten a monograph that uses examples from actual yuho fil-ings to illustrate the treasures they contain. Please contactme if you would like to receive a copy of this paper.)

Public companies also release “flash reports” (kessan tan-shin) of their financial results within 60 days of the end of thequarter. The numbers contained in these reports do not carryan outside auditor’s stamp of approval and sometimes varyfrom the final results submitted in annual and semiannualreports. The Japanese business media avidly watch thesereleases, as data on performance in the current period but alsoestimates for the future are provided.

Japanese companies generally have no obligation to pro-vide information in English unless they have listed their shareson an exchange in the United States through AmericanDepositary Receipts (ADRs). Those companies file Form 20-F annually with the U.S. SEC and report their quarterly resultsand other material events on Form 6-K. Currently, there areonly 19 Japanese companies listed on the New York StockExchange and 10 on NASDAQ. Japanese companies that tradeon the OTC Bulletin Board or Pink Sheets have minimal SEC

reporting requirements and do not need to state their resultsaccording to U.S. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Prin-cipals). There are currently about 130 of these companies.

A number of publicly traded Japanese companies voluntar-ily disclose their financial results in English. Availability of thisinformation varies by company and is typically a factor of thenumber of foreign shareholders that the company has or theamount of business that the company does outside Japan.These reports are usually available on the company’s Web siteor from sources such as Global Reports [http://www.global-reports.com]. This company provides subscribers with accessto annual reports and other filings from more than 28,000companies around the world.

Private companies have limited disclosure requirements.All joint stock companies (kabushiki kaisha) must publish bal-ance sheets annually in the Official Gazette (kanpo), in a dailynewspaper such as the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, or through elec-tronic means such as their Web sites. Large private companieswith paid-in capital of at least 500 million yen or liabilities of20 billion yen or more also have to publish their income state-ment at the same time. Private companies must also providetheir financial results and other information on a voluntarybasis to credit bureaus such as Teikoku Databank (TDB). Forexample, the TDB databases on Dialog and LexisNexis had fullfinancials for six of the 10 private companies that I looked atfor this article.

Financial StatementsFinancial information data is available from a wide range of

sources, a number of them shown in Table 1 on LexisNexisresources. In general, this type of data is more readily availablethan other forms of Japanese company information because itlends itself to relatively easy translation into English.

When looking at company financials, watch whetherinformation is shown on a consolidated (parent and sub-sidiaries) or unconsolidated (parent only) basis. Japanesecompanies have been required to report their financialresults on a consolidated basis since 1999. Most also reportresults on an unconsolidated basis. There can be a largedifference between the two. For example, in its latestannual yuho filing for the period ending March 2006, the



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consolidated results for Toyota Motor Corporation includedthe parent itself and 579 other affiliated companies andsubsidiaries. These Toyota groups contributed more than $92billion in sales to Toyota’s consolidated results for the year.

Most of the sources discussed in this article give consoli-dated financials, although the record usually does not indicatethis. D&B’s International Market Identifiers and Teikoku Data-bank’s Japanese Company records (both on Dialog and Lexis-Nexis) generally give financials on an unconsolidated basis.

Currency factors can also confuse users of financial informa-tion. A number of sources provide information only in U.S. dol-lars rather than the “as-reported” Japanese yen results, with noindication of the exchange rate used for translation. This makesyear-to-year comparison difficult, as there is no way to isolate theeffects of exchange rate fluctuations from changes caused by thegrowth or slowdown in the business itself. Nelson’s Public Com-pany Profiles make matters even more confusing when it giveslocal currency financials, but labels them as U.S. dollar results.

Fiscal and “Emperor” YearsAlmost 75 percent of the companies listed on the Tokyo

Stock Exchange have an April 1 to March 31 fiscal year, whichmatches the government’s fiscal year. Seven of the public com-panies and six of the private companies in the test group fol-lowed this convention, which makes May and June the equiva-lent of tax time for financial journalists in Japan as thousandsof companies report their financial results for the last year.

While Japan has used the Gregorian calendar since 1873,it also uses an alternate system for numbering years based onthe reign of the current emperor. For example, 2006 is also Hei-sei 18 or the 18th year of the reign of Emperor Akihito, whowill be called Emperor Heisei posthumously. The previous era,Showa, extended from 1926 to 1989. This numbering systemis still used extensively for official filings, including financialdisclosures. Japanese patents filed prior to 2000 also use theera number. To convert between Western and Japanese era num-bers, go to http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2272.html.

Language IssuesThe Japanese language is considered one of the most com-

plex in the world, with three different writing systems: two pho-

netic (hiragana and katakana) and one that uses ideograms bor-rowed from China (kanji). In addition to the difficulties thesepresent to students of the language, kanji poses some addi-tional challenges to the researcher and database publisher.These problems occur because there is a many-to-many map-ping between kanji characters and their pronunciation. In otherwords, individual kanji characters and compounds can be readin different ways, and many different kanji characters and com-pounds have the same reading.

This means that:

• Given a Japanese name written in kanji, there are often mul-

tiple ways in which the characters can be read. This is es-

pecially true for given names and place names. Often the

correct reading can only be determined by speaking with

someone who knows the person. For company research, this

may mean a telephone call to the firm to determine how to

pronounce an executive’s name.

• Names that appear the same when written in English may

differ when written in Japanese. Looking at the top man-

agers in a Japanese company in a recent project, I found

one individual who appeared to have done an amazing vari-

ety of different jobs within the company over a number of

years. Only when I turned to Japanese sources did I realize

the problem — there were two individuals, both with the

same name, but written using different kanji characters.

Only by using their Japanese names could I untangle the job

histories of the two executives.

There are also multiple ways of Romanizing Japanesewords, including the unofficial Hepburn system and the offi-cial Japanese government method (ISO 3602). These systemsdiffer in how long vowel sounds are represented. Hepburn usesa macron or short line to distinguish between long and shortvowels, while the official system uses a circumflex. These dia-critical marks are often omitted for convenience in companyand personal names. For example, Sanyo is used instead ofSanyô and Taiyo Yuden rather than Taiyô Yûden. The long osound can also be written as “ou” or “oh.” Mitsubishi Shin-doh, Ohkura Electric, and Kita Koudensha are all examplesof this. Even for the same company, usage may vary. A searchin Factiva gave me 593 hits with “Mitsubishi Shindoh” and70 hits with “Mitsubishi Shindo.”



(Text continued from page 43)

Japanese Companies 101 (continued)



similar. In all cases, the databases missed wholly ownedcompanies that the parent clearly identified as consol-idated subsidiaries.

Shareholder information can help identify impor-tant business ties that the company has with otherfirms, as well as executives who also own a significantstake in the company. Yuho filings typically list the top10 shareholders. For public companies, this informa-tion is available in English in the Japan CompanyHandbook and the Thomson Ownership database(available on various Thomson Financial platformsand from Alacra). The Major Companies Databaseand Gale Company Briefs also provide information onkey shareholders, although both appear to have a 5-percent cutoff, which may not suffice when trying toidentify corporate insiders.

There is usually a story behind any large sharehold-ers that are not banks or other types of institutionalinvestors, and access to Japanese-language sourcesmay be the only way to determine what lies behind thenumbers. In my test group, the leading shareholder forsix of the 10 public companies was a larger entity withwhich the company has significant business ties. Theexact nature of this relationship was detailed in its yuho

filings, including related-party transactions and thenames of the directors who represent the shareholder’sinterests on the company’s board. To the best of myknowledge, there are no English-language sources forthis type of information.

A need to identify company management with sig-nificant ownership is another reason to turn to Japan-ese sources. This may be more complex than simplycomparing the list of top shareholders to current com-pany management and directors, as shares are oftenheld indirectly through a company controlled by theshareholder. Four of the public test companies hadsignificant insider ownership, and, in two cases,shares were held indirectly. Fortunately, companiesare required to disclose both stock owned outright bydirectors and senior management and stock held indi-rectly through a company they control. The filings alsodetail any related-party transactions between theseinsiders and the company.

Private CompaniesThere are two main sources of English-language

information on privately held Japanese companies:Teikoku Databank’s Japanese Companies database and

(Text continued from page 41)

Table 2. Private Company Directories: Teikoku Versus Dun & Bradstreet

Teikoku Databank: Japanese Companies Dun’s International Market Identifiers

Industry classification Primary and secondary using Teikoku IndustryClassification codes

Primary and secondary using SIC codes

Brief financials 2 years 1 year

Detailed financials Available on Dialog and LexisNexis for six of 10 companies in test group

May be available from D&B

Credit rating in basic record Yes No

Number of shareholders Yes No

National sales ranking Yes No

Banking relationships Yes No

Chief executive Name, home address and phone number, birth date andplace, and alma mater

Name only

Corporate family tree No Yes (partial; see section on corporatefamily trees)

Branch information No Yes

Unique identifiers Teikoku Company Number DUNS numbers and Tokyo ShokoResearch Business Identifiers

Dun’s International Market Identifiers (D&B). Both areavailable on LexisNexis and Dialog. Table 2, PrivateCompany Directories: Teikoku Versus Dun & Brad-street, on page 45 summarizes the key differencesbetween the two databases.

The financial information in the D&B records was1–2 years older than that in the Teikoku database forfive of the 10 private companies tested and D&B failedto pick up changes in senior management in two of the10 records I checked. Most D&B records on Dialog thatI examined contained both DUNS Numbers and TokyoShoko Research Business Identifiers, which reflects therelationship that D&B has with Teikoku Databank’schief competitor in Japan. Unfortunately, this alliance,which began in 1994, has not resulted in English-language availability of more current information.

While the basic Teikoku Databank record provides acredit rating, you may need more detailed informationwhen looking at private companies. Two aggregatorsfor this type of data are SkyMinder [http://www.skyminder.com] and Wolff Worldwide [http://www.wolffworldwide.com]. Both companies have access to creditinformation from a wide range of national, regional,and international sources.

Various Japanese-language sources also focus onprivate company research. As discussed in the sidebar,some private companies have to file annual and semi-annual securities reports (yuho filings) with the Min-istry of Finance. These reports may also be mentionedin the yuho filings of other companies, if they havematerial business transactions with filers.

Teikoku’s Japanese-language database also providessome additional information on private companies,such as the names of directors, shareholders, impor-

tant suppliers, and key customers. The Tokyo ShokoResearch (TSR) database contains similar information;its executive profiles even list CEOs’ hobbies (almostinvariably golf).

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Group (“Nikkei”), pub-lisher of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan EconomicNews) and other publications, serves as another sourceof Japanese-language information on both public andprivate companies. The company publishes a Japanesecompany database that covers more than 30,000 com-panies (approximately 26,000 of them private). Nikkeiprofiles were available for four of the 10 private com-panies in my test group. While less extensive than thepublic company profiles, these profiles did contain agold mine of information on private companies: • Description of the company’s business• Short history• Information on branch offices and subsidiaries• List of executives (name, date of birth, job respon-

sibilities, alma mater)• Key suppliers and customers• Banking relationships• Shareholders• Employee information (number of employees by

gender with average age and salary)• Capital structure• Sales by sector• Financials (balance sheet and income statement) for

last 20 fiscal years• Sales and profits for last 5 years• Related companies and subsidiaries• Trade association memberships

Corporate Executives and DirectorsOf the English sources for Japanese executives, the

names and titles listed in the Market Guide CompanyProfiles (LexisNexis) and Factiva Company Reportswere the most accurate, though in some cases thetransliterations did not match trusted Japanesesources. A subset of the same information appears inGoogle Finance, where, hovering above an individual’sname, you can see additional information, such as ageand date of appointment to the position. Reuters is thesource for all three.

Japanese-language disclosure filings contain moreinformation, including a director’s date of birth, edu-cation (school attended and major), and a listing ofpositions the person has held in the company alongwith dates of appointment. This information is invalu-able for understanding the background of key execu-tives. Large corporate shareholders will also typicallyappoint directors to the company’s board. You can eas-ily identify these individuals in the yuho filings.



Of the English sources for Japanese

executives, the names and titles listed

in the Market Guide Company Profiles

(LexisNexis) and Factiva Company Reports

were the most accurate, though in some

cases the transliterations did not match

trusted Japanese sources.



Information on managers further down in theorganization is also available. Many Japanese compa-nies publicly announce personnel changes, which arethen picked up by the Nikkei Keizai Shimbun (JapanEconomic News) and its sister publication, the NikkeiSangyo Shimbun (Nikkei Business Daily). These articlesoften appear in March to announce changes to takeeffect from the beginning of the next fiscal year in April.I have used this information on a number of occasionsto reconstruct the career path of key personnel.

Various companies, such as Nikkei, TSR, and Dia-mond (publisher of the Japanese version of the Har-vard Business Review), maintain Japanese-languagewho’s who databases of corporate executives. Diamondalso publishes a related database that details the orga-nizational structure of many large companies (bothpublic and private).

Company NewsTo evaluate company news coverage, I took five of

the 10 public companies in the test group and searchedDialog (using the JAPANNEW OneSearch Category),LexisNexis, Factiva (both English and Japanesesources), and the Nikkei Telecom 21 online service[http://telecom21.nikkei.co.jp] for news articles pub-lished in the last year. I then removed any obvious falsedrops and duplicate articles dealing with the sameevent (such as coverage of the same quarter’s financialresults by different publications) to determine thenumber of unique articles each aggregator carried. Theresults appear in the Table 3, Number of Unique NewsArticles by Aggregator, above.

As Table 3 shows, Dialog, LexisNexis, and Factiva(English sources) are not the places to go to get up-to-date news about smaller Japanese companies. Notealso that while it appears that Factiva has better cover-

age in English, these hits were almost entirely earningsannouncements from Dow Jones International andReuters. Excluding such hits, the three services showlittle difference. The difference between Factiva’sJapanese sources and Nikkei Telecom 21 stems mainlyfrom the former’s lack of access to Nikkei’s Japanese-language sources.

A similar, though less dramatic, situation exists forlarger, better-known Japanese companies. While cov-erage for these companies is better than it is for smalland medium-sized small companies, English-languagesources still only capture some of the information avail-able in Japanese. For example, over the last year, thefour Nikkei newspapers carried 1,238 Japanese-lan-guage articles with the word Toyota in the headline. Asearch of the Nikkei Report (available on Factiva),which contains translated articles from these samepapers, only yielded 242 hits. Similar results occurredwhen looking for Sony (850 versus 233 hits).

So, what do the English-language sources miss? Inaddition to more detailed analyses of financial results,the Japanese-language sources had interviews with topexecutives, announcements of personnel changes andstrategic alliances, discussions of company prospects,news on the opening of new factories and closing of oldones, industry roundups, and coverage of major cor-porate events such as mergers and acquisitions.

ConclusionSo what did I learn on my travels through the vari-

ous databases that claim to offer insight into the mys-teries of Japanese companies? • Getting the basic facts on most Japanese compa-

nies is not difficult, especially if you start withtrusted sources such as Toyo Keizai’s Japan Com-pany Handbook and Teikoku Databank’s Japanese

Table 3. Number of Unique News Articles by Aggregator (1-Year Period)

Dialog (English)

LexisNexis(English)

Factiva (English)

Factiva(Japanese)

Nikkei Telecom 21(Japanese)

Company A 0 0 8 12 25

Company B 1 0 6 17 27

Company C 0 0 6 15 26

Company D 1 1 9 31 34

Company E 1 0 7 7 18



Companies database. Relying on English sourcesto go beyond this will rarely reach informationon most small and medium-sized Japanesecompanies. Even for larger companies you willprobably miss things. You need access to locallanguage information to fill in many of the de-tails and to truly understand a company’s busi-ness operations, leadership, corporate familytree, and key commercial relationships.

• Not all sources are created equal. Some data-bases were appallingly bad. Even within an oth-erwise reliable database, some fields could notbe trusted.

• The easier the information is to translate intoEnglish, the more likely that it will be correct. Fi-nancial information is a good example. Transla-tion of a balance sheet is simply a matter ofmatching Japanese accounting terms with theirEnglish counterparts. Names, on the other hand,can be difficult, even for native speakers ofJapanese.

A number of database publishers appear toobtain their content through licensing arrange-ments with other publishers, so you cannotassume that something is correct just becauseyou see it in several places. It might have justcome from the same questionable English-lan-guage source.

If you have a lot riding on the search, find someway to get access to Japanese-language sources ofinformation. Only by using local language resourcescan you get behind the bamboo fence and makesure that you have the best available information onyour target company.

Finally, I would like to thank Amelia Kassel,super searcher extraordinaire, for kindly provid-ing comments on a draft of this article. Thanks,Amelia! Your amazing knowledge of businessresearch techniques and willingness to help oth-ers in the searcher community are an inspirationto us all. ◆

Tom Lister is president of Data Meridian Research, a busi-ness research firm that specializes in Japanese businessinformation and international trade research. He enjoysdelighting clients with the company’s ability to locate“impossible-to-find” information on Japanese companiesand markets. He can be reached at [email protected] and enjoys helping fellow information professionalswith Japan-related searches.

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