This Time, Investing in Japan Actually Pays

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Jul 14

For most of the last 35 years, investing in Japan has been an exercise in patience, pain, and occasionally comedy. Every few years, Wall Street would rediscover Japan. Strategists would dust off the ...

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Strategists would dust off the ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.benzinga.com/opinion/26/07/60431238/this-time-investing-in-japan-actually-pays\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":"benzinga_recent_news","html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>This Time, Investing in Japan Actually Pays</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThis Time, Investing in Japan Actually Pays\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2026-07-14 05:44 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.benzinga.com/opinion/26/07/60431238/this-time-investing-in-japan-actually-pays><strong>Benzinga_recent_news</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>For most of the last 35 years, investing in Japan has been an exercise in patience, pain, and occasionally comedy.\nEvery few years, Wall Street would rediscover Japan. Strategists would dust off the ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.benzinga.com/opinion/26/07/60431238/this-time-investing-in-japan-actually-pays\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"JAPN","symbol_name":"Horizon Kinetics Japan Owner Operator Etf","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://www.benzinga.com/opinion/26/07/60431238/this-time-investing-in-japan-actually-pays","article_id":"2651121960","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":["https://cdn.benzinga.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=240,format=auto,quality=85/files/images/story/2026/07/13/Japan-Flag-With-Stock-Market-Finance--Ec.jpg"],"rights":{"source":"benzinga_recent_news","url":"https://www.benzinga.com/opinion/26/07/60431238/this-time-investing-in-japan-actually-pays","rn_cache_url":null,"directOrigin":true},"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2651121960","pubTimestamp":1783979040,"columns":[],"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"benzinga_recent_news","name":"Benzinga"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"For most of the last 35 years, investing in Japan has been an exercise in patience, pain, and occasionally comedy.\n\n\n\nEvery few years, Wall Street would rediscover Japan. Strategists would dust off the same slides,","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"benzinga.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"JAPN":"Horizon Kinetics Japan Owner Operator Etf"},"translate_title":"这一次，在日本投资确实有回报","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"JAPN":1},"content_text":"For most of the last 35 years, investing in Japan has been an exercise in patience, pain, and occasionally comedy.\nEvery few years, Wall Street would rediscover Japan. Strategists would dust off the same slides, point to low valuations, talk about reform, mention the aging population in a somber voice, and tell us that this time was different.\nThen nothing much happened.\nJapan stayed cheap. Corporate management stayed indifferent. Balance sheets stayed lazy. Shareholders stayed somewhere near the bottom of the priority list, just above the guy delivering copier paper. The market would rally for a while, disappoint everyone, and then go back to being the world’s most famous value trap.\nThat is the old Japan story.\nThe new Japan story is more interesting.\nThe Tokyo Stock Exchange has been pushing companies to explain why they trade below book value and what they intend to do about it. Management teams are being forced to think about return on equity, return on invested capital, cash hoards, cross-shareholdings, buybacks, dividends, and shareholder returns. That may not sound revolutionary in the United States, but in Japan it is the financial equivalent of someone opening the curtains after a 35-year nap.\nGoldman Sachs calls this Japan’s strategic awakening. The country is becoming more important geopolitically, more focused on defense, more serious about supply chain resilience, and more central to the future of semiconductors, robotics, industrial automation, shipbuilding, and advanced manufacturing. Japan is not just cheap anymore. Japan is strategically important, under-owned, and finally being pushed toward better capital allocation.\nThat brings us to the Horizon Kinetics Japan Owner Operator ETF (NASDAQ:JAPN).\nJAPN is not another broad Japan index fund. That is the whole point.\nMost investors who buy Japan through the big ETFs think they are getting exposure to Japan. They are not, at least not in the way they probably think. They are getting a basket of large-cap exporters and global multinationals that happen to be headquartered in Japan.\nToyota. Sony. Mitsubishi UFJ. Hitachi. Nintendo. Tokyo Electron. Advantest.\nThose are fine companies. Some are excellent businesses. That is not the issue.\nThe issue is exposure.\nThat is not really Japan the domestic economy. That is Japan the global export platform.\nInvestors looking for the impact of Japanese corporate reform, domestic consumption, local entrepreneurship, labor scarcity, automation, productivity improvement, and governance change may not capture much of that by owning the same mega-cap companies everyone else already owns.\nJAPN was built to attack that problem.\nThere is a reason this matters in Japan.\nTraditional Japanese corporate culture has often been shaped by lifetime employment, risk aversion, bureaucracy, and the desire to avoid disruption at all costs. That may be socially comfortable, but it is not always wonderful for shareholders. Large companies can ignore niche opportunities, move slowly, sit on assets, and protect old relationships long past their useful life.\nEntrepreneurs do not usually have that luxury.\nJapanese owner-operators can move faster. They can pursue overlooked niches. They can allocate capital more intelligently. They can build businesses around local demand and then potentially expand globally. They also have something many professional managers lack: their own money on the line.\nThat tends to sharpen the mind.\nHorizon Kinetics argues that Japan has plenty of innovation. The country produces about 8% of global patent filings, behind China and the United States. The challenge has not been the absence of ideas. The challenge has been turning ideas, assets, intellectual property, and niche business models into shareholder value.\nJAPN’s strategy is built around that opening. The fund looks for two things.\nFirst, it wants Japanese owner-operators — companies with entrepreneurial leadership, strong capital allocation, information advantages, and incentives to maximize return on equity, return on invested capital, and shareholder returns.\nSecond, it wants a Japan-centric posture. The companies should have core revenue anchored in domestic demand, benefit from Japanese intellectual property and innovation, have optionality for global expansion, and be positioned to benefit from shareholder-focused regulatory and policy changes.\nThat is a more precise Japan thesis than simply buying the index and hoping the yen behaves.\nAs of the most recent factsheet, JAPN had 32 holdings, a weighted average market capitalization of $2.7 billion, price-to-book of 2.4 times, price-to-sales of 1.6 times, and return on equity of 20.2%. The fund’s active share was 99.4%, which means this is not one of those active funds that charges active fees to own the same stocks as the benchmark while pretending the manager is doing deep thinking in a conference room somewhere.\nThe top holdings included Furuno Electric, Japan Elevator Service Holdings, Resorttrust, Hikari Tsushin, Pan Pacific International Holdings, Furyu, ULS Group, M&A Capital Partners, Yonex, and Finatext Holdings. The top 10 holdings made up 47.5% of the portfolio.\nThat concentration is important. This is not a watered-down index product. JAPN is a concentrated active bet on a specific segment of the Japanese market.\nThat can work very well if the manager is right. It can also underperform badly if the manager is wrong. Nobody should pretend otherwise.\nA few of the sample holdings show what Horizon Kinetics is trying to do.\nPan Pacific International Holdings operates discount stores and supermarkets. Founder and chairman Takao Yasuda owns a significant stake. The company built a retail model that combines convenience, discounting, and entertainment, while sourcing and pricing merchandise to meet local demand. That is a domestic consumer business with a differentiated model and founder influence.\nIG Port is an animation production and intellectual property company. The company has built an animation IP catalog and is working to monetize that intellectual property in Japan and globally. That fits nicely with Japan’s broader cultural and intellectual property strengths. It is also the kind of niche business that index investors often miss until after the easy money has already been made.\nJAPN is still young. The fund launched on May 12, 2025, trades on Nasdaq, and has an expense ratio of 0.85%. Horizon Kinetics manages the ETF, with Murray Stahl, Aya Weissman, and Utako Kojima listed as portfolio managers. The firm has been managing a dedicated Asia and Japan strategy since 2008, and the portfolio team has deep experience in Japanese and Asian investing.\nShort-term performance has not been exciting. As of March 31, 2026, the factsheet showed a year-to-date market price return of negative 11.91% and a NAV return of negative 13.50%. Since inception, the annualized return was negative 8.45% on market price and negative 10.54% on NAV.\nThat is not pretty.\nIt is also not decisive.\nA concentrated active fund focused on smaller Japanese owner-operators is not going to move in a straight line. It is not designed for people who judge a long-term strategy by a couple of quarters and then run to the nearest mega-cap tech ETF because CNBC looked excited.\nThe question is not whether JAPN has had a smooth start. It has not.\nThe question is whether the underlying thesis makes sense.\nI think it does.\nJAPN offers a way to own the part of Japan that looks most interesting to long-term value investors: founder-led, domestically rooted, underfollowed businesses that may benefit from corporate reform, local demand, better capital allocation, and eventual global expansion.\nThis is not a risk-free idea. The fund is concentrated. It owns smaller and mid-cap companies. It is exposed to Japan-specific risks, currency risk, active management risk, and the possibility that reform takes longer than expected. Japan has disappointed investors before. Anyone who says otherwise either has a short memory or works in marketing.\nYet the opportunity is real.\nThe broad Japan trade has already been discovered. The better opportunity may be underneath the index, where owner-operators are building businesses away from the spotlight. That is where JAPN is looking.\nIn a world where most global equity portfolios are stuffed with the same U.S. mega-cap names, JAPN provides something genuinely different. It is active. It is concentrated. It is domestically focused. It is aligned with the owner-operator philosophy. It is tied to one of the more interesting structural reform stories in the developed world.\nThat makes it worth serious attention.\nJapan is no longer just cheap. Japan is cheap enough, improving, under-owned, and finally being forced to care about shareholders.\nThat is a much better story.\nJAPN may be one of the cleaner ways to invest in it.\nTo add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.","kind":"highlight","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":false,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"1","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"isVideo":false,"video":null,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"need_login_tip":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"}}}