About 30 percent of companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that close their books in March — 696 firms — hold annual shareholders meetings on Thursday, making it the peak day. In the past, what often drew people's attention to such meetings was the presence of sokaiya racketeers who owned a few shares in the companies so they could attend and extorted money from the management in return for not making any trouble. These days, attention is focused on the roles played by major shareholders such as institutional and foreign investors, whose exercise of their voting rights sway the approval of management proposals.

In this situation, individual shareholders should also take their roles seriously. These people mostly remain mute at the meetings of the companies whose shares they have bought, except when the firms are embroiled in well-publicized scandals or management troubles. Most of these shareholders are believed to own stakes in the companies either for dividend payments or capital gains when the shares go up. However, they should realize that shareholders meetings are not just annual ceremonies but provide good opportunities for them to evaluate the management of the firms and prod them to improve their performance.

According to the Japan Securities Dealers Association, there were a record 18.1 million individual shareholders at the end of fiscal 2015, holding about 17 percent of shares in listed companies in value terms. Several factors have contributed to the increase — the spread of online stock transactions, the introduction in 2014 of the Nippon Individual Savings Account, in which individual investors will be eligible for tax exemptions on their financial gains if the annual investment is ¥1.2 million or less, and the 2015 listing of the three firms under Japan Post Holdings Co. that drew strong investor attention.