Tokyo Deep Value

Japanese stocks are the last great deep value trade on earth. Rock solid balance sheets. Monster cash flows. Dirt cheap prices. I find them and buy them

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Japanese stocks are the last great deep value trade on earth. Rock solid balance sheets. Monster cash flows. Dirt cheap prices. I find them, trade them, and do it all over again. Follow for the best deep value plays in Japan nobody else is talking about.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I’ve been doing quiet “field research” in Soapland since 2022.

Call it Japanese small-cap intelligence gathering with happy endings.

Last quarter I hit a discreet spot in Kabukicho for the usual ¥52,000 course.

My therapist that night had the tired eyes of someone who’d just spent three hours power-washing the stress off a 58-year-old plant manager from a niche auto-parts maker in Aichi.

Between the mat wash and the “special massage,” she casually dropped that the old man was losing sleep over mounting China exposure, a new Chinese competitor eating 18% share, and a factory expansion in Thailand that was already 40% over budget with zero orders yet.

She even knew the exact model line bleeding cash.

I left, ran every 10-K equivalent I could find at 2 a.m., discovered the company was trading at 0.6x book with net cash > market cap and literally zero English sell-side coverage.

Took a 1.4% position in the obscure piston-ring supplier nobody’s heard of.

Eleven weeks later it popped 47% on a surprise buyback + guidance cut that confirmed every bubble-sud detail.

Public Japan is still kabuki.

Real color only comes out when the suit comes off and the soap goes on.

Salarymen don’t lie naked.

That’s the edge. Still the best research method in 2026.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

The conventional way to research a Japanese net-net is to pull the financial filings, translate them, screen for net current asset value, check the land carried on the balance sheet at acquisition cost, and look at the shareholder register for activist accumulations. This is what every American investor who has discovered the Japanese trade in the last three years now does. It works. It also misses, by some margin, the things that actually predict which names in the basket will be the ones that re-rate.

The unconventional research is what nobody runs. The unconventional research is reading the company's recruiting page, in Japanese, because the language a 70-year-old president uses to describe what he is looking for in a new hire reveals more about his actual succession thinking than anything that will ever appear in a proxy statement. A president still hiring "loyal lifetime employees" is a president who will die at his desk. A president quietly hiring "young people with international experience" is a president who has begun, in some part of his mind, to think about who will own the company after him, and that thought, statistically, precedes a sale by roughly 28 months.

The unconventional research is looking at the company's annual employee photograph, which Japanese small caps still publish in their annual reports, and counting the women, because a Japanese industrial company in a regional prefecture that has, in the last five years, gone from zero women in management positions to two, is a company whose leadership has begun, quietly, to absorb the governance pressure that the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been applying, and that absorption is itself a signal.

The unconventional research is checking the company's electricity consumption, which is reported in many municipal energy disclosures in Japan and which is, surprisingly, publicly available if you know where to look. A factory that is reducing its electricity consumption while reporting flat revenue is a factory that is, quietly, becoming more efficient, which means the operating margin trajectory in the next 18 months is going to surprise to the upside. A factory whose electricity consumption is rising faster than reported revenue is a factory that is, in some hidden way, ramping production in advance of a contract that has not yet been disclosed. The data is free. Nobody looks at it.

The unconventional research is calling the company's main bank, which is disclosed in every Japanese filing, and asking, politely, whether they have noticed any changes in the company's borrowing patterns over the last 18 months. They will not tell you anything material. They will, sometimes, mention that the company has been "more active recently," which is, in the careful coded language of Japanese regional banking, an acknowledgment that something is happening, the nature of which they will not disclose, but which you can now incorporate into your understanding of the position.

The unconventional research is reading the local newspapers of the city where the company is headquartered, in Japanese, with a translation tool, because the regional press will, in a way the national press will not, report the small ceremonial events that almost always precede major corporate transitions: a retirement banquet, a new chairman of the local chamber of commerce, the opening of a new wing at the company's longtime philanthropic project. These are not material events. They are, in aggregate, the texture of what is actually happening inside a 60-year-old industrial company in a prefecture that the rest of the world will never visit, and the texture is the thesis.

I have, over six years, built positions in 41 Japanese net-nets, and the unconventional research has, in my private accounting, accounted for somewhere north of 70% of the returns. The 30% that came from the conventional research, the screens and the filings and the activist filings, would have been available to anyone. The 70% from the unconventional research was available only to someone willing to spend their Saturday mornings reading a small-town Japanese newspaper through a translation tool, counting women in employee photographs, and calling regional banks to ask questions that would not, technically, be answered. Almost nobody is willing to do this. That unwillingness is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, the entire reason the math still works.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Sources of edge on Japanese small caps:

- Hiding in the sushi restaurant bathroom near HQ

- Eavesdropping on salarymen at the izakaya at 11pm

- The smoking area outside the Tokyo Stock Exchange

- A pachinko parlor in Nagoya where the CFO allegedly goes Thursdays

- The 6am bullet train, where they read the real newspaper

- Nobody else is willing to live like this

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

A Japanese wood distributor doing ¥399B in sales — worth ¥35B.

Net cash covers 45% of the market cap. Land carried at pre-war cost. Management's buying back ~9% of the stock a year at a 4.5% yield.

0.55x book. ~2x EV/EBITDA.

The market's pricing a liquidation. It's a company buying itself in.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Just got the best stock tip of my life from a sushi chef in Tokyo. Sat at an 8-seat counter in some alley in Ginza. No English menu. Old guy slicing tuna for 40 years. Three drinks in he tells me his nephew runs ops at a company I’ve never heard of. Trades on the second section. P/E of 4. Net cash is 60% of the market cap. Sells a product that every car in Japan needs. Zero analyst coverage because the filings are only in Japanese. Family owns 38%. I am buying this on Monday with both hands. The best DD on earth is being the only foreigner in a room where nobody is trying to sell you anything.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

My Japan deep value process:

- Buy a company trading below net cash
- Realize they own the building, the parking lot, and a golf course in Shizuoka
- All carried on the books at 1989 prices
- None of it will ever be sold

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

You can buy Japanese electric utilities under liquidation value. New writeup.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I have, over the last nine years, made eleven separate trips to rural Japan for the sole purpose of visiting the headquarters and factories of small-cap companies whose stocks I own, in towns that do not appear in any guidebook, that are not on any tourist itinerary, that require two trains and a bus and, on three occasions, a taxi driver who had to call the company for directions because the address did not resolve on his navigation system.

I do not speak Japanese beyond the 200 or so words I have accumulated for this specific purpose, which are heavily weighted toward terms like "factory," "thank you," "shareholder," "excuse me," and "I have come a long way." I bow at angles I have practiced in hotel rooms the night before. I bring gifts, wrapped correctly, selected on the advice of a translator I retain by the hour. I show up, unannounced or barely announced, at the headquarters of a forklift-spring manufacturer in Gifu Prefecture, or a precision-bearing company in a town outside Nagoya, or a chemical company in an industrial ward of a city most Americans could not place on a map, and I am, almost without exception, received.

The reception itself is the research. I am looking at things that do not appear in any filing. I am looking at whether the parking lot is full, which tells me whether the factory is running at capacity. I am looking at the age of the cars in the parking lot, which tells me whether the employees are paid well and have been there a long time. I am looking at the condition of the founder's photograph on the lobby wall, the freshness of the flowers at the entrance, the alignment of the slippers outside the executive office, all of which tell me, in aggregate, whether this is a company that still believes in itself or a company that has begun, quietly, to give up. I am looking at whether the president, who is almost always somewhere between 71 and 84 years old, walks me through the factory himself, which means he still loves it, or hands me off to a subordinate, which means he is preparing, in some part of his mind, to let it go.

I am served tea. The tea is almost always lukewarm. I have come to understand that the lukewarm tea is not an insult but a ritual, a small offering of hospitality to a stranger who has traveled an absurd distance to look at a factory that produces a component for a machine that most of the world does not know exists. I drink the tea. I ask my three questions, through the translator, slowly. The president answers, often at far greater length than the question required, telling me about his father, who founded the company, and his grandfather, who operated the original machine, and the 41 employees, several of whom are the children of employees who worked there before them. None of this is in the 10-K equivalent. None of this can be scraped, modeled, or found on a screen. It exists only in the room, and the only way into the room is to physically travel to it, which almost no foreign investor will ever do.

I have, on these eleven trips, visited the headquarters of 34 companies. I own 27 of them. I have, on three occasions, decided not to invest in a company I had traveled thousands of miles to visit, on the basis of something I saw in the lobby, or felt in the room, or understood from the way the president did or did not look at the founder's photograph on the wall. The trips cost me, in aggregate, somewhere north of $90,000 over nine years. The information they have produced has been worth multiples of that, not because any single visit produced a single actionable insight, but because the cumulative effect of having stood in 34 lobbies, drunk 34 cups of lukewarm tea, and bowed to 34 elderly presidents, is a felt understanding of an entire market that no amount of screen-reading could ever produce. Almost nobody is willing to do this. Almost nobody is willing to fly to a town they cannot pronounce to look at a factory they will never operate, owned by a man they cannot speak to, producing a component they do not understand. That unwillingness is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, the entire reason the math still works.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

My Japan deep value process:

- Buy a profitable company at 0.5x book
- Notice ¥4 billion in cash just sitting there
- Email investor relations
- Receive no reply, ever

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Found a really cheap Japanese shitco that I might writeup. Here are the key stats:
- 2.2x EV/EBITDA
- 7.3x P/E
- 3.5% dividend yield
- 32% free cash flow yield.
- 0.4x P/BV

The best part? EPS is inflecting upwards with Q1 up 51%.

Just another cheap Japanese stock.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I’ve been quietly running Japanese small-cap diligence in Soapland for years, and last week a ¥52,000 session in a sleepy Kabukicho annex handed me the most degenerate alpha I’ve ever sniffed.

Walked in after hours, therapist was a battle-hardened veteran who’d just finished power-washing three straight shifts of drunk Hitachi suppliers. Mid-bubble, while she’s got me in the classic “Tokyo Bay reverse wash,” she starts ranting about her 68-year-old regular — some regional president who keeps delaying retirement because “the company is my mistress.”

She drops the exact ticker (obscure auto-parts midget in Aichi), how they’re hoarding cash like it’s 1989, inventory piling up in the warehouse, and the new Chinese competitor eating their lunch on pricing while the old man still insists on 3-hour in-person morning meetings. She even knew their latest gross margin compression to the decimal because the guy cries about it every Thursday.

I tipped extra, showered, sprinted home, pulled the last three annuals + factory tour footage at 2 a.m. Net cash 68% of market cap. 0.4x book. Zero sell-side coverage. Family succession fight brewing. Bought 1.1% of the float before breakfast.

Twelve days later it ripped 47% on a surprise tender offer rumor.

Corporate Japan still runs on two sets of books: the polite IR PowerPoint bullshit, and the raw, sudsy truth that only comes out when salarymen are naked, horizontal, and paying someone to listen. The bubbles don’t lie. The therapists see more real capex discipline than any Nomura analyst ever will.

This is 2026 alpha hunting, baby. Forget the Bloomberg terminal. Sometimes you gotta get lathered up to see where the real numbers are hiding.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Imagine how much Buffett would be up on his Japanese stocks if he got information at soapland.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Warren Buffett didn't fly to Tokyo for the sushi. He's now the largest foreign holder of Japanese trading houses. While retail argues about Nvidia, the Oracle is quietly building the biggest non-US position of his career. Pay attention.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I have, over 14 years of attending the annual shareholder meetings of Japanese small-cap companies, accumulated 312 business cards from executives, board members, investor relations officers, and, on three occasions, the wives of founders who were attending in their husbands’ place. I store them in a custom-built cedar box, sized to my specifications by a craftsman in Kyoto, because I was told, very early on, by a Japanese friend who has since stopped returning my calls, that to store a Japanese business card improperly, in a wallet or a drawer or a shoebox, is among the deepest disrespects one can offer in Japanese business culture, and that the only correct method of storage is in a wooden box, of unfinished cedar, with each card placed face up, in the order received, and never, under any circumstances, thrown away.

I have not thrown one away. I have not thrown one away in 14 years. The cedar box, which began as a small jewelry-sized container, is now approximately the size of a carry-on suitcase, and sits on the floor of my closet, where I retrieve it, every Sunday morning, to add the new arrivals from the previous week and to, in a small private ceremony I have never described to anyone until this moment, briefly hold each new card in both hands, bow once, and place it on top of the previous one in the correct chronological order.

My wife, who I love deeply, has stopped asking about the box. She asked about it in 2014. She asked about it again in 2017. The third time, in 2021, she did not ask, but stood in the closet doorway for several minutes, watching me bow at a small piece of cardstock, and then closed the door slowly and walked away without speaking. We have not, since then, discussed the box, the cards, or the cedar, although she has, twice, in casual conversation, mentioned to friends that her husband has “a hobby involving Japan,” in a tone that I understand to be the linguistic equivalent of a white flag.

I have, over the years, developed an entire research methodology built around the cards. The card itself tells you things the proxy statement does not. The thickness of the cardstock is correlated, in ways I have personally documented, with the conservatism of the company’s balance sheet. The font choice on a Japanese executive’s business card reveals more about the company’s internal culture than any 10-K paragraph ever has. The presence of an English translation on the reverse side tells you, with roughly 80% accuracy, whether the company has been preparing for foreign shareholder communications, which is itself a signal of impending governance reform, which is itself a signal of impending shareholder return.

I have built positions in 47 Japanese small caps based on initial impressions formed entirely from business cards. I have closed positions in 19 based on the same. I have not, in any of these decisions, been demonstrably wrong, although I acknowledge that the sample is small and the methodology is, by any reasonable standard, the kind of thing that should not work and yet, in my private accounting, has.

The cards are still arriving. The box is still growing. The cedar craftsman in Kyoto, who I have never met in person, has, through a translator, indicated that he is willing to build me a second box when the first one fills, which, at current accumulation rates, will be sometime in 2031. I have committed to him that I will, when the time comes, fly to Kyoto, in person, to receive the second box from him directly, because to receive a cedar box of that significance through the mail would be, I have been told, an even greater disrespect than storing the cards improperly in the first place, and I have, in 14 years of doing this, learned exactly two things about Japanese business culture, which are that the rules are infinite, and that almost nobody outside Japan is willing to follow even the first ten of them, which is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I have, over the last five years, attended the funerals of the founders and retired chairmen of nine small-cap Japanese companies I own, in cities I do not live in, for men I have never met. I fly in the night before. I buy white chrysanthemums at the train station, because a Japanese friend told me, once, that white chrysanthemums are correct, and I have not deviated since.

I wear a black suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. I arrive 30 minutes early. I bow at the entrance. I bow at the family. I bow at the urn. I bow at the photograph of the deceased, who is always smiling in a way that suggests the photograph was taken at a company event in approximately 1994. I place an envelope of cash in the box at the door, in the correct denomination, prepared in advance, in a special envelope I order from a Japanese stationer who has, by now, learned my address.

I sit in the back. I watch which executive bows lowest to the widow, because that man, statistically, is the man who is about to be promoted. I watch which competitor has flown in to pay respects, because that company, statistically, is the one that will make the offer within 16 months. I leave after 40 minutes. I have not been spoken to at any of these funerals, by any person, in five years.

I attribute this to the fact that in every Japanese funeral I have ever attended, there is always one quiet foreigner in a black suit nobody knows what to do with, and I have, in a precise and unintended way, become that man.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I flew to Osaka with a 14-page activist letter, a translated copy of my proposed slate of independent directors, a slide deck on capital allocation reform, and what I believed, at the time, was a clear and reasonable demand: that the company, which was sitting on cash equal to 180% of its market cap, return a portion of it to shareholders through a special dividend. I had been working on this campaign for nine months. I had hired a Tokyo-based proxy advisor. I had built a 6% position through patient accumulation. I had, by every framework I understood, done the work.

The chairman, who was 81 years old, received me in a tatami room above the company's headquarters, which sat over a soba restaurant that had been in the same family for four generations. He was wearing a navy suit. He bowed at an angle I could not, with my Western training, accurately reciprocate. He gestured for me to sit on a cushion. I sat. A woman of approximately his own age entered, silently, and placed a small ceramic cup in front of me. The cup contained tea. The tea was lukewarm. I did not yet know that the lukewarm tea was the entire negotiation.

I began with the deck. I had prepared it carefully. I had translated the headers into Japanese. I walked him through the capital structure, the unproductive cash, the historical return on equity, the peer comparison, the proposed dividend. He listened. He did not interrupt. When I had finished, he said, in soft but clear English that I had not been told he spoke, "Thank you for traveling so far." Then he stood up, slowly, and gestured for me to follow him.

We walked down a set of wooden stairs that creaked in a way I cannot adequately describe, through a hallway lined with black-and-white photographs of men I did not recognize, and into a small workshop attached to the back of the building. In the center of the workshop was a lathe. It was old. It was, the chairman explained, the original lathe his grandfather had purchased in 1923 to manufacture the first product the company had ever sold, which was a specific kind of brass valve fitting used in steam locomotives. The locomotive industry had been gone for 60 years. The lathe was still running.

"My grandfather operated this machine," he said. "My father operated this machine. I operated this machine, as a child, before school. The factory you visited yesterday produces components that descend, in an unbroken line of design, from the work that began on this lathe. The cash you wish me to distribute is the result of one hundred and one years of refusing to do anything that would shorten the life of this company. I cannot distribute it. I am not, in the deepest sense, the owner of it. I am the custodian of it. The owner is not yet born."

I did not have a response. I had prepared for many possible responses from him. I had not prepared for this one. We returned to the tatami room. The tea was refreshed. It was, again, lukewarm. The chairman asked me about my family. I told him about my wife, my two children, my parents in suburban Connecticut. He listened with what appeared to be genuine interest. He asked the ages of my children. He nodded gravely when I told him. He asked whether I had ever shown my children the work I do. I had not. He asked whether I would, when I returned. I said I would consider it.

Four hours passed. I was served, at various points, three more cups of tea, a small dish of pickled vegetables I did not recognize, and a single piece of mochi that the chairman's assistant placed in front of me with both hands. Nobody mentioned the activist letter again. Nobody mentioned the dividend, the directors, the deck, the proposal, or the 6% position. We talked about the cherry blossom season, which was apparently late this year. We talked about American baseball, which the chairman had followed since 1962. We talked about a poet I had never heard of, whose work he recited a single line of in Japanese and then translated for me, slowly, into English, and which I have, in the three years since, been entirely unable to locate again.

At the end of the meeting, he stood. He bowed. He thanked me, again, for traveling so far. He said he hoped I would visit again, perhaps with my family, perhaps in the spring, when the city was at its best. He did not, at any point, acknowledge the proposal. He did not decline it. He did not engage with it. He simply, through a series of small and almost invisible movements that I am still trying to understand three years later, allowed the proposal to dissolve into the air of the room, until by the time I left the building, it had ceased to exist as a thing that had been said.

I flew home the next morning. I withdrew the campaign two weeks later, in a quiet letter to the proxy advisor that cited "ongoing discussions" and was technically not a withdrawal at all but was understood, by every party who received it, to be one. The position I sold over the following six months at a small loss. The chairman is still alive. The lathe is still running. The cash is still on the balance sheet.

I cannot, even now, explain what happened in that room. I went in as an activist, with a deck, a translator, and a six percent position, and I came out as a guest who had been thanked, very politely, for visiting a man's home, and who, somewhere in the four hours between the first cup of tea and the last, had been quietly, gently, irreversibly, and without a single raised voice or harsh word, defeated.

I think about him often. I do not think he thinks about me at all. This is, in some sense I am still working out, the entire lesson.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

@miller_uri Thank you!

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I just launched a website that allows anyone to screen for cheap Japanese stocks. Take a look. Let me know if you guys like it. This is what I’ve been using internally to write about these stocks. Let me know if you want me to add anything.

https://t.co/HuAJRMpPgW

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

Follow along for my journey in the land of the soap and cheap Japanese equities

https://t.co/lP3POspSyq

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I have been quietly attending Soapland for years in the name of Japanese equity research, and last month it delivered one of the cleanest edges I’ve ever found on a cheap Japanese stock.

I walked into a quiet spot in Yoshiwara for a standard ¥48,000 session. The therapist was sharp, the kind who’d spent the whole week scrubbing exhausted salarymen from a sleepy industrial supplier in Gifu Prefecture. Between the legendary bubble technique and the special rinse, she started venting about this one stubborn client — a 72-year-old president who still refused to retire.

Domestic orders were softening, the company was sitting on a mountain of cash it barely deployed, but the old man wouldn’t budge on costs or succession. She named the exact supplier, the margin pressure they were feeling, and how the whole operation was running like it was still 1995.

I listened, asked a few gentle follow-ups, walked out, ran the numbers that night. The company was trading at 4x earnings with a fortress balance sheet, net cash covering half the market cap, and almost no analyst coverage. I bought 0.9% of the obscure forklift-spring manufacturer whose name I still can’t pronounce.
Six weeks later it rerated 38%.

That’s the thing about corporate Japan. In public, everything is polite theater and hierarchical silence. But in those private rooms where ranks dissolve in soap suds and tired section chiefs finally drop their armor, the real unfiltered color leaks out — overtime realities, capex delays, succession drama, inventory builds. The kind of early signals that never make it into Nomura notes or IR decks.

I’ve cross-checked enough of these bubble briefings against later earnings to know the edge is real. The math doesn’t lie, and neither do the bubbles.

This is how you still find genuine information asymmetry in 2026: by going where the salarymen actually talk.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

I’ve been one of Soapland’s top foreign patrons in the name of Japanese equity research for the last two years. It’s been one of my best investments.

Two weeks ago Hisui no Yume handed me one of the sharpest, most specific edges I’ve turned into real money on a neglected small-cap.

I took the train to Minowa, walked the narrow Yoshiwara streets, and stepped into the sleek, low-lit entrance at 4-32-1 Senzoku, Taito-ku, Tokyo. ¥88,000 for 120 minutes after the guide coupon. The cast that day was stacked; I picked a 24-year-old former gravure model with porcelain skin and the kind of quiet confidence that makes you forget she’s working.

She led me upstairs, drew the deep marble bath, and poured the thick, jasmine-scented soap. What followed was pure ritual: her body pressed slick against mine in the tub, then the move to the bed The friction was relentless, perfect.

Lying there afterward in the clean sheets, still breathing heavy, she wiped me down gently and we started talking. Turns out one of her long-time regulars is a section chief at a obscure electronics component supplier in Tochigi Prefecture. The guy had been coming every other week for months, increasingly loose-lipped as the sessions wore on.

He’d complained about his company’s main customer — a major EV parts assembler — quietly slashing orders by 25% for Q3 while publicly talking up “green transition.” The firm was sitting on ¥18 billion in net cash (almost 60% of its ¥31 billion market cap), had delayed a planned factory upgrade in Gunma for the third year running, and the aging founder was blocking any real cost cuts or diversification. She even remembered the exact product: precision connectors used in automotive sensors. She mimicked the guy’s grumbling tone so well I could picture the tired salaryman spilling it all between bubbles.

I kept my questions casual, left an extra large tip, and left. Back at the hotel I pulled up the filings on that thinly traded TSE Standard name nobody covers. Trading at 4.8x trailing earnings, 0.6x book, 3.8% dividend yield, and a float so small I could build a 0.8% position without moving the tape. The last two quarterly reports showed exactly the order softness she described, masked by one-time gains.
I bought aggressively the next morning. Twelve days later the company pre-announced upward guidance and a surprise ¥5 billion share buyback funded by the cash hoard. The stock popped 44% in four sessions. I trimmed half on the spike.

This is the unfiltered alpha you only get when the armor is off. In the conference rooms it’s all keigo and slide decks. But here, naked and spent in a high-end Yoshiwara room, with a beautiful woman’s hands still on you, the salarymen finally drop the corporate script. Real order books, real management inertia, real cash piles that aren’t being deployed.
Hisui no Yume isn’t cheap, but for a gaijin hunting genuine information asymmetry in 2026, the fieldwork more than pays for itself. The suds don’t lie.

[Tokyo Deep Value @TokyoDeepValue]

The best thing about going to Soapland for due diligence is the ability to write it off as a business expense. You gotta think outside of the box as a value investor in Japanese equities.