JP-Listed Companies

Two filings, very different visibility

Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA) runs two separate regimes for people close to a listed company. Officers and major shareholders, meaning holders of 10% or more of the voting rights, report their own dealings in the company's securities. Anyone whose ownership ratio exceeds 5% files a large-shareholding report. Only the second is published as a matter of routine.

Article 163: trading reports that stay with the bureau

Under FIEA Article 163, an officer or major shareholder who buys or sells the company's securities on their own account submits a report by the 15th of the month following the trade. The law addresses it to the Prime Minister; the Financial Services Agency directs filers to the Kanto Local Finance Bureau. When the trade goes through a broker, the report is filed through that broker.

The reports exist to police the short-swing profit rule of Article 164: if an insider buys and sells within six months at a profit, the company can claim the gain. When the authority finds such a profit, it sends the relevant part of the report to the insider, then to the company, and makes it available for public inspection 30 days later. Outside that case, officers' trading reports are not published, so Japan has no trade-by-trade public record of directors' dealings.

The 5% rule on EDINET

A holder whose ownership ratio of a listed company's shares exceeds 5% files a large-shareholding report (tairyo hoyu hokokusho) within five business days. It states the holding, the purpose of holding and the source of the funds used to buy. After that, any change of one percentage point or more, or a change in a material item, triggers a change report within five business days. Article 27-26 gives banks, brokers and asset managers that do not seek to influence management a lighter special-reporting route.

Both reports are filed electronically on EDINET, the Financial Services Agency's disclosure system, and remain open to public inspection for five years.

How to read the Japanese data on this site

Our Japanese feed comes from the EDINET API and covers large-shareholding and change reports only. The source registry classes it as holdings: each record is a position snapshot, to be read as a change in a stake rather than as a single trade, and the structured EDINET data carries no per-trade price or amount. Article 163 reports are absent because they are not published.

A filing here tells you who crossed a threshold, in which direction and by how much. It does not tell you whether a director bought on the market. The way each figure is computed is set out on the methodology page.