A practical guide for investors outside Japan
Japan has roughly 3,800 listed companies, and overseas interest in them has grown steadily since Berkshire Hathaway's stake in the trading houses (2020), the Tokyo Stock Exchange's governance reforms, and the Bank of Japan's move away from zero rates. The catch: almost all of the research infrastructure — disclosure documents, screeners, investor commentary — is Japanese-only. This page covers the parts you actually need: how the disclosure system works, the market quirks worth knowing before you screen, and where to screen in English.
EDINET is Japan's equivalent of the SEC's EDGAR, run by the Financial Services Agency. The document that matters most is the annual securities report (yūka shōken hōkokusho) — the closest thing to a 10-K: audited financial statements, segment data, major shareholders, and risk factors. It is due within three months of fiscal year-end. You can read any filing free at disclosure2.edinet-fsa.go.jp.
Separately, TDnet (run by the exchange) carries timely disclosures. Earnings summaries (kessan tanshin) appear there first — weeks to months before the full annual report. Most filings are Japanese-only; larger companies often publish English IR summaries, and machine translation is now good enough to read a full filing without Japanese.
A large share of companies close their books in March, so annual filings cluster in June. Screening data based on annual reports refreshes in an annual rhythm, not a quarterly one.
Decades of conservative balance-sheet management left many companies holding cash and securities well in excess of total liabilities — "net cash" situations at a frequency that surprises investors used to US markets. This is the core of Japan's deep-value reputation.
Since 2023 the exchange has asked companies trading below book value to publish plans for improving capital efficiency. Buybacks, dividend hikes and unwinding of cross-shareholdings have followed at many companies — an ongoing catalyst theme unique to this market.
Since the 2022 reorganization the TSE has three segments: Prime, Standard and Growth. Small-cap value names sit disproportionately in Standard.
Tatsuo Kiyohara's 2024 bestseller My Investment Method made small-cap net-cash investing mainstream among Japanese retail investors, but the book and its screening criteria are virtually unknown in English. (We reproduce his net-cash ratio as a cited preset.)
The major domestic screeners (Kabutan, Buffett Code, Shikiho online) are Japanese-only. Global screeners cover Japan, but fundamentals depth varies and the good ones are paywalled.
Katana — this site — is a free screener built directly on EDINET annual filings: English UI, no login, presets that cite their methodology (Graham, Piotroski, Kiyohara and others), and a formula editor for custom metrics. Think Finviz, but for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Two caveats, stated plainly: price-related values are as of each company's fiscal year-end (back-calculated from the disclosed trailing PER), not live quotes; and coverage is still being extended toward all TSE-listed names.