Every nominee on Starts Corporation's eleven-name director slate won a board seat at the Tokyo-listed builder's 54th annual shareholder meeting on June 26. But two of them needed unusually thin margins to get there. President and Representative Director Toyotaka Muraishi was re-elected with just 66.02% of votes cast in favor: 277,947 shares for, 142,975 against, and 46 abstentions. Fellow director Hisaji Muraishi fared only a little better, at 69.08% approval, with 290,824 votes for and 129,627 against. The figures come from an extraordinary report Starts filed with the Kanto Local Finance Bureau under Japan's financial instruments law, which requires companies to disclose the exact vote tallies behind shareholder-meeting resolutions.
| Nominee | Votes for | Votes against | Approval rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toyotaka Muraishi (President) | 277,947 | 142,975 | 66.02% |
| Hisaji Muraishi (Director) | 290,824 | 129,627 | 69.08% |
The contrast with other nominees is stark. Director candidate Taro Saito, for instance, drew 376,709 votes in favor against only 44,211 opposed, a far wider margin than either Muraishi managed. The filing does not break out every candidate's tally in the excerpt available, but the pattern is clear: shareholders backed the slate overall while withholding a meaningful share of support specifically from the president and one other director bearing the same surname.
The same meeting approved a second item on the agenda: a retirement bonus for outgoing director Tamotsu Naoi, in recognition of his service, which passed without the report noting any comparable opposition. Newly elected to the eleven-member board is Hideyuki Naoi, a name that shares Tamotsu Naoi's surname, alongside nine other appointees including Kyuji Muraishi, Taro Saito, Manabu Nakamatsu, Takahiro Hasegawa, Hisayuki Muramatsu, Genji Ishida, Kazuya Hiraide, Naoko Takahashi and Yoshio Yamamoto.
The vote also lands alongside a separate management change at the company. A second extraordinary report filed the same day shows that Kazuo Isozaki, who held the post of Representative Director and Vice Chairman, retired from that role effective June 26, the same date as the shareholder meeting. The board had approved his departure at a meeting on June 19; Isozaki held 21,717 Starts shares as of the filing date.
What the filings do not say is why support for the president and his fellow director ran so far below the rest of the board. Starts has not disclosed a shareholder proposal, proxy-advisor recommendation, or governance dispute tied to the vote in the materials reviewed. For a company where the founding family's name recurs across the director list, a one-third dissent rate on the top job is the kind of number a governance-minded investor files away, even without a stated cause.