Monday
It is 5.30am and I am wide awake, having been awoken several times over the last few hours despite trying to get as much shut-eye as possible. But this time it is permanent: the Captain tells passengers on the flight from London to Tokyo that we will soon start our descent. I only have carry-on luggage – two decades of research trips to Japan has honed my packing skills – so I am through passport control in 20 minutes. A monorail and a swift taxi ride later, I am checked into my hotel, eating breakfast, drinking coffee and psyching myself up for what is to come.
For investors in Japanese equities, as I have been since 2004, there is a rhythm to research effort. Quarterly reporting, strict quiet periods, and the concentration of company year-ends in March – or, less commonly, December – create four well-defined windows each year in which investors can speak directly with companies. That is why once a quarter either myself or Mitesh Patel, my co-manager on the Jupiter Japan Income and Japan Select funds, decamp to Japan.
Tuesday
The previous day had been relatively light. Cognisant of jetlag I had arranged to visit just two companies. Every trip needs a varied diet of existing and potential holdings, early and later stage ideas. Monday’s meetings had been with non-holdings: good businesses in unloved sectors with which we had fallen out of touch. A construction contractor and a plant engineering company, the meetings covered inflation in raw materials and labour, contract re-pricing and demand for critical infrastructure – a reminder that our trips uncover market themes, not just company insights.
Today would be busier, with four meetings across four sectors. This variety is what makes my job fascinating, but also exhausting, especially when my body thinks it is time to sleep when it is time to work.
Meetings done, it is time to call the office. Mitesh and I discuss my day, especially the medical devices company – a holding we had added just months before. With instant-synch meeting notes, live financial models, Bloomberg screens and now AI tools at our fingertips, I am struck by how times have changed. When I first started this beat, hotel phone calls were discouraged, notes went in Black n’ Red books and stock discussion waited until you were back in the office.
Wednesday
More meetings: a retailer, a tech hardware company, an online ad agency and a satellite constellation operator. Themes stand out again. The retailer adds colour to the debate on wages. The tech hardware and online ad companies are all about AI – one an opportunity, the other a threat. The satellite operator says interesting things about Japanese defence expenditure, which I note for later in the week.
After the daily run-through with Mitesh, it is dinner with an old colleague who lives in Tokyo and also invests in Japanese equities. A couple of cold Asahis and some yakitori skewers and we are both salarymen like the locals surrounding us.
Thursday
Today I am on the road, or rather the rail, arrowing from Tokyo to Kyoto at 180mph in near silence. Kyoto is surely one of the world’s most photogenic cities, but there is no time for sightseeing. I have appointments with leading electronic components companies. Japan as a country of contrasts – old meets new, East meets West – is a cliché worn threadbare. But my visits, to companies providing 21st century ceramic component technology for AI adoption in a city famous for centuries-old ceramic manufacture, remind me that cliché is often based on fact.
My last meeting, in metropolitan Osaka, is the main assignment: top brass at one of the world’s best known Japanese companies. To some, the company has seen better days – its consumer electronics heyday receding into memory. We see things differently, and we think management does too. Highly profitable, fast-growing businesses within the group are being crowded out by legacy operations. Today is about engagement, supporting management eager to do right by their business long-term – conversations valuable enough to justify the trip alone, and which could never happen over video call.
Friday
Back in Tokyo, a breakfast meeting with the head of investor relations at one of our holdings, a diversified financial company. He has been for a run; I have not and feel bad. Apparently, he also runs with the new President. I cynically presume career advancement his motivation, but the fragment of insight into the company’s culture and its leader is enlightening in a way dry financial modelling cannot match.
An early start lets me fit in four more meetings: machinery, pharmaceuticals, heavy engineering and a leading air-conditioner manufacturer. AI makes every agenda – even the drugmaker’s. Critical infrastructure demand comes up again, and with the heavy engineering company I discuss the shape, not just scale, of coming Japanese defence spending. Triangulating these findings with earlier ones is gratifying, and a picture starts to emerge.
It is Friday night and the daily download to Mitesh waits, because I have dinner plans with Nami in Kagurazaka, arguably Tokyo’s best district for food. Nami, the trip’s unsung hero, has been by my side since before my plane touched down, arranging meetings and providing language support. My Japanese does the business in bars and taxis, but in meetings where every nuance counts, it is better to bring in the real expert – and Nami is that.
Saturday & Sunday
The dreaded middle weekend, so often wasted in hotel gyms and shopping centres. Not this time: I am off to Hakodate on Hokkaido. The place is fascinating, full of Western architecture – a Russian Orthodox church, a timber-fronted Public Hall like something from Nantucket, an old British consulate – all reminders of the international commerce that pulled cloistered Japan into globalising modernity in the mid-to-late 19th century. Not for the first time, I am reminded that my purpose in Japan has very deep roots.
The weekend is also my chance to catch up with the family. Snatched calls with the kids through the week have confirmed that they are fine, and that I miss them more than they miss me. On Saturday night we have a proper catch-up.
Sunday, back to work: editing notes, finding meaning, reviewing agendas for the week ahead. Not a bad place to do it though, on the Shinkansen past castles, mountains and forests until we roll into a neon-lit Tokyo, just in time for bed before doing it all again.
