Material disclosures, two markets, one vocabulary

The finding: Korea files about money, Japan files about control

Both lists answer the same question — what must a listed company tell the market at once? They answer it differently. Over the window where we hold both records (2026-08-25 to 2026-09-21), the Korean stream is dominated by financing and commercial events and the Japanese stream by ownership and governance events.

Our grouping, not the regulators’. We put each of the 33 event types into one of the two buckets once, and we list every type below so you can regroup them yourself.

What this is not. It is not evidence that Korean companies raise more money or that Japanese boards change hands more often. It is a fact about what each regulator makes them announce. A Japanese company signing a large supply contract may well disclose it — through the exchange’s timely-disclosure channel, which is not the filing system we read here.

How often, once the windows are made comparable

We started collecting the two countries on different dates, so the raw totals are not comparable and we do not put them side by side. Below is the window where both records exist, divided by the days we actually captured — not by calendar days, because a day we missed is not a day without filings.

Outside this window we hold more: 816 Korean filings from 2026-08-25 and 1,430 Japanese filings from 2026-06-30. Those are in the tables below and in the sample; they are left out of this comparison only.

Korea — 18 event types in the shared window

Ordered by frequency, not importance — we do not rank these, because which one matters depends on the company you are looking at.

Japan — 17 event types in the shared window

Every Japanese extraordinary report carries the same title — 臨時報告書 (rinji hōkokusho, “extraordinary report”) — so a headline tells you nothing about what happened. We read the XBRL element the filer used inside the document instead: the element name is the event type. These names are therefore the filer’s own labels rather than our paraphrase.

Where they came from

The 40 most recent, both countries

40 of 2,246 shown. The full tagged files are part of the Korea and Japan datasets.

Read this before you use it

• This is not the full disclosure stream. Publishing a national feed in bulk raises questions we would rather not have to answer; publishing selected material events — the way a US Form 8-K works — does not. So we keep a fixed list of event types per country and drop everything else.
• Names we could not translate, we did not. Where a company has no English name on file with its regulator we print the ticker instead of inventing one: 10 of 2,246 rows are like that.
• The Korean count is net of a subtraction. 46 further filings out of the 862 we captured carry no ticker — unlisted filers, and subsidiary filings made under a parent’s name. We report the subtraction rather than let 862 quietly become 816.
• No history before we started. Neither source hands back a bulk archive, so each record starts the day we began collecting and grows one day at a time.
• No money amounts yet. A supply-contract filing states a value and a counterparty; we carry the event, not yet the amount. That is the next build.
• No view on whether any of this is good news. That is yours to form.

Sources

Korea — Financial Supervisory Service, DART, dart.fss.or.kr.
Japan — Financial Services Agency, EDINET, disclosure2.edinet-fsa.go.jp.

Each row links to the filing it came from. The event names on this page are ours: we wrote them in English from the filing categories and XBRL element names, and we say so rather than presenting them as a regulator’s own wording.

This page reports filings. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Related

Korea on its own, in more detail · Screen these companies by their filed figures · Korean financial statements · the rest of the catalogue.