This past April, Japanese pitching sensation Daisuke Matsuzaka wowed Red Sox Nation with his “gyroball.” From now until next April, Dave Sackett expects to be equally mesmerized by Japan’s version of the corporate curveball.

The corporate controller of Ulvac Technologies is charged with implementing J-SOX — the Japanese edition of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (sometimes abbreviated as SOX). The process is a “huge deal” at the Methuen, Mass.-based subsidiary of Ulvac Inc. of Japan because the private firm (the parent is public) has never thought much about documenting internal controls or formalizing its audit trail. “Our reporting has been kind of loose in the past, but now we need to document everything,” Sackett says.

[1] CFO.com: CFOs and controllers at U.S. subsidiaries of Japanese firms begin implementing the Japanese version of Sarbanes-Oxley.