To wipe out superheroes, the villain of the Pixar movie "The Incredibles” had a fiendish plot: He would make them ubiquitous. "When everyone’s super,” the villain named Syndrome opined, "no one will be.”
The Tokyo Stock Exchange has no such diabolical goals. Yet it’s at risk of making Japan stocks just as irrelevant with its much-hyped but disappointing market reorganization, which created a new Prime segment to house Japan’s best companies — then opened the category to almost everyone.
The exchange ditched its confusing existing segments at the start of April and created three new sections for Japan’s nearly 4,000 listed companies, including the top-tier Prime segment. But Prime has launched with 1,836 members. Some of its members include Brass Corp., a wedding planner in the industrial heartland of Aichi with a $37 million market cap; Tokyo Ichiban Foods Co. Ltd., which operates 75 blowfish restaurants; and P-Ban.com Corp., a maker of circuit boards with 28 employees. Do these stocks really represent the best of Japan’s business world?