2023 Japan Dividend Portfolio update: I have 29 positions and added some new ones this year. Overall, 2023 was a good year that saw most all of my positions do dividend raises (the focus of my portfolio is value and passive income) while also doing buybacks. Japan looks attractive as a value and dividend market going into 2024. My general investing strategy is a focus on:
1. diversification (preserve portfolio value)
2. cheap valuations (buy the floor price)
3. net cash and low debt
4. history of dividend increases
5. small caps

Interesting write up recently from Toyo Keizai about the influx of rich Chinese into Tokyo
A few key takeaways from the article:
1. Since 2022, over 20,000 Chinese with assets of over 1m USD have left China. Many are coming to Japan. Japan is easy to enter
toyokeizai.net/articles/-/696… 2. Why is Japan easy to enter? It's just a 3hr trip from Shanghai/Beijing (where the wealthy are from)
3. Visas are easy: if they invest 5m yen (with some conditions), they can get a business resident visa.
4. Japan has no restrictions or extra taxes on foreigners buying property

Most wealthy people I know or have met in Japan own land, property, or run some 100+ year old family business. Stocks are not really part of the equation. It's still true for many Japanese to think that stocks are scary/not correlated much with wealth. A barrier to investing here Then you have reasonably stable family businesses here that hoard lots of cash but are publicly traded (prestige) and have various family members among all the major shareholders. It's sort of a "If it ain't broke, don't change it" mentality.

Kishida recently announced that he wants to increase the number of foreign students studying in Japan. Already, a record nearly 300,000 foreign students are now studying in Japan. What is left unsaid however: it's essentially an worker immigration program
www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/2022… It's now common in many Japanese cities to see foreigners (mostly from China, Vietnam, and Nepal) working at convenience stores and restaurants. Other places less visible: growing number of foreigners who work in factories, kitchens, and bento packaging stations.

Expect lots of Western media coverage next few days to spin Japan’s recent election results as some sort of right wing shift. That kind of reporting is disingenuous. Japan is a center right country with lots of apathetic voters. There are no western style culture wars here. Japan is also not really democratic. Real “Western style” democracy was imported to Japan by occupation forces. Culturally, many people in Japan will always prefer stability and predictability. The LDP represents this: why they’ve been in power nearly uninterrupted since WWII.

“Bro, your family can visit you in Japan, no problem. They just need to quarantine at your house for 10 days. No big deal.” LOL. Dude. My wife would kill my family if they stayed at my house for more than 3 days. Hell, I can’t even stand my family after a few days! “Why don’t they just stay in a hotel for 10 days then?” Like that’s better? Fuck, my family would probably kill each other trapped in a small room for 10 days.

After getting a lot of feedback on my thread on Kiritani, Japan's most famous retail investor ("the poor man's Japanese Buffett!), I decided to do a deeper thread on Kiritani, the millionaire investor who lives like a rat. /1 While Kiritani is a household name in Japan, he had actually already been famous for years before as a professional Shogi (Japanese chess) player. He also famously made (and then lost) a million dollars trading stocks during Japan’s bubble era. /2

America has Warren Buffett, but Japan's most famous investor is 71-year-old Kiritani, who has a portfolio of over 500 stocks totaling over 400 million yen. He does not own a car and rides around everywhere in his bicycle. He's also known for his love of shareholder perks. /1 Shareholder perks are called kabunushi yutai 優待 in Japanese, and are a strange feature of the Japanese stock market. About 1/3 of all Japanese companies give out shareholder perks. Assuming a 1% yield, Kiritani is easily collecting 40,000 dollars in tax free gifts every year /2