One investment vehicle into the Japan market is through an exchange traded fund. Today, I’ll be talking about iShares MSCI Japan Index (Symbol: EWJ).

This ETF invests at least 95% in Japanese company assets that are primarily traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

As of August 1, 2007, EWJ was trading at $14.22. It’s up 2.69% YTD and 7.29% for the past 12 months.

EWJ has just over 60% of its holdings in Consumer Goods, Financials and Industrials. The other sizable area is Basic Materials, which accounts for 9.6% of the portfolio.

It’s fairly spread out. The top holding, Toyota, only accounts for 5.8% of the holdings. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is next on the list at 3.3%.

The current holdings list shows Canon, Sony and Honda each account for about 2%. Towards the bottom of the top 10 holdings are Matsushita Electric Industrial and Nippon Steel Corp—1.5% and 1.4% respectively.

As of June 30, 2007 EWJ has $13.5 billion in net assets.

The yield on this ETF is moderate at 0.70%. The last declared annual dividend was $0.0995.

Morningstar defines EWJ as a large blend exchange traded fund.

Since 2003, EWJ has been slowly trending upward.