Japan Company Register: How to Search the Corporate Number Publication Site and Verify Japanese Companies (2026)

1. What is the Japanese company register?

Japan splits company data between two systems. The legal record is the commercial register (商業登記, shōgyō tōki), kept by the Legal Affairs Bureaus (法務局, hōmukyoku) of the Ministry of Justice: the bureau or branch office with jurisdiction over a company's location handles its registrations. A Japanese company only comes into existence when it registers at its head office location, and for a kabushiki kaisha the entry covers its purpose, trade name, head office and branches, share capital, shares, directors, the representative director's name and address, and its method of public notice.

The free lookup is a different system. Since October 2015 the National Tax Agency (NTA) has designated a corporate number (法人番号, hōjin bangō) to every corporation established by registration, working from the register data it receives from the Minister of Justice, and it publishes the name, head office address, and number on the Corporate Number Publication Site. When a company registers a change of name or address, the Ministry of Justice passes it on and the NTA record updates without the company filing anything. Companies that file securities reports publish them on EDINET, the Financial Services Agency's disclosure system.

In short: the NTA tells you a company exists and where, the commercial register tells you who runs it and on what terms, and EDINET tells you how a company that files securities reports performs.

2. How to search the Corporate Number Publication Site step by step

Searching is free and needs no account. The site runs in Japanese and English, but the two versions are not the same: the English one only finds companies that asked to register an English name and address, and the NTA says its content is not always the same as the Japanese site. For a company without an English registration, such as Toyota, you end up on the Japanese pages, which is less daunting than it sounds, because a corporate number search needs no Japanese at all.

1. Open the site and pick a tab

   There are two tabs: search with name, address, and other conditions, or search with the corporate number. The name search offers partial or prefix matching, the address block takes a prefecture or an address outside Japan, and a filter separates public organisations from private entities, because national ministries and local governments have corporate numbers too.

   

2. Search by corporate number when you have one

   Enter the 13 digits as single-byte numbers and you get exactly one entity. A separate page takes several numbers at once (up to 10 on the Japanese site), which helps when you are checking a short supplier list by hand.

3. Switch to the Japanese site if the English search finds nothing

   Toyota has registered no English name, so the English name search returns no hit for it at all. The Japanese site, linked top right, is not limited to English registrations. Its name and address search also takes the katakana reading of the name or a postcode, and it includes closed companies in the results by default. One default works the other way: a company whose registered head office address no longer exists, for example after a readdressing, is left out of name and address searches unless you tick the box to include excluded corporations (検索対象除外法人).

4. Open the company record

   The record shows the latest information: the corporate number (法人番号), the trade name (商号又は名称), its katakana reading where the company filed one, the head office address (本店又は主たる事務所の所在地), and the date the record was last updated (最終更新年月日). There are no fields for directors, capital, or contact details.

   

5. Read the change history, then go to the register for the rest

   Below the latest information sits the change history, each entry with its date: earlier names and addresses, mergers, any closure, and the day the number was designated. Toyota's lists two mergers in which it absorbed group companies, in 2018 and 2019, and the designation of its number on 5 October 2015. For directors, capital, and purpose you need the commercial register itself, which the callout on the commercial register below explains.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Japan gives away the identity of a company and charges for its substance. Everything on the Corporate Number Publication Site is free, including the bulk files. Everything about who runs the company comes from the commercial register, at a national fee per record or per certificate.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, the commercial register holds no financial statements. A kabushiki kaisha has to publish its balance sheet itself after each annual general meeting, and a large company (share capital of JPY 500 million or more, or liabilities of JPY 20 billion or more) its profit and loss statement too, in the Official Gazette, a daily newspaper, or online (in the Gazette or a newspaper a summary is enough). The register only records which method the company chose and, where it publishes online, the web address. Companies that must file securities reports are exempt from this notice; their accounts are on EDINET. Second, the register is kept in Japanese. Even a foreign company's name and its directors appear in katakana in the Ministry of Justice's own sample certificate.

What you will not find anywhere in the free layer: directors, share capital, purpose, revenue, employee counts, or contact details. A kabushiki kaisha's shareholders are not in the commercial register either, because the Companies Act lists its directors and auditors among the registered matters but not the people who own the shares. And for a kabushiki kaisha that files no securities reports, the figures the Companies Act makes it publish are the balance sheet notice, plus the profit and loss statement for a large company.

4. Japanese legal forms, briefly

The Companies Act (Act No. 86 of 2005) knows four types of company: kabushiki kaisha, gōmei kaisha, gōshi kaisha, and gōdō kaisha, and each must carry its type in its trade name. The corporate number system reaches further, covering general associations and foundations, school corporations, religious corporations, medical corporations, and non-profits, as long as they were established by registration. The third column below shows whether a form gets a corporate number at all.

When you match names, strip the legal form first. 株式会社 can sit before or after the name: the NTA's own sample company is 株式会社国税商事, while Toyota is トヨタ自動車株式会社. An English supplier list that says Toyota Motor Corporation will not match the register character for character, so match on the corporate number instead.

5. How to verify a Japanese company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the corporate number and the name

   Search the 13-digit number on the Corporate Number Publication Site and check that the name and head office address match what you were given. Run the check digit as well: a number that fails it is not a valid corporate number. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Look for a closure or a recent change

   Open the change history under the latest information. When a company's registration record is closed, the NTA record shows the reason (completion of liquidation, dissolution by merger, or closure by the registrar) and the date. A trade name or head office that changed shortly before your deal is worth a question.

3. Pull the commercial register record

   For JPY 330 the Registration Information Service shows the full record: purpose, share capital, shares, directors, the representative director, branches, and the method of public notice. If you need a certified copy, request a certificate of registered matters instead, from JPY 490 online. The law lets anyone request one, so you do not need the company's cooperation.

4. Check who may sign

   The representative director (代表取締役) is registered with name and address. Check that the person signing is on the record. Since October 2024 a kabushiki kaisha can ask for that address to be shown only down to the municipality (the ward in Tokyo and in designated cities), so a short address is not a red flag in itself. The seal certificate (印鑑証明書) can only be obtained by the persons who filed the seal, so if a contract is sealed, ask the counterparty for a recent certificate.

5. Check the invoice registration number

   If the company issues qualified invoices, its registration number is T followed by its corporate number. Look it up on the NTA's qualified invoice issuer site. A missing entry does not mean the company is fake: the number only exists once the company has applied to its tax office and been registered.

6. Find the accounts

   If the company files securities reports, read them on EDINET. Otherwise look at the method of public notice in the register. A kabushiki kaisha publishes its balance sheet in the Official Gazette, a daily newspaper, or online, and where it publishes online the register gives you the web address. A gōdō kaisha has no such duty, so do not expect published figures.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: as an identity check, the Corporate Number Publication Site is genuinely good, free, and current. The limits appear the moment you need to know anything beyond who and where:

• The free data is thin. Name, head office address, number, and change history. Directors, capital, and purpose all sit in the paid commercial register.
• English is opt-in. The English site only covers companies that registered an English name and address, and each English record states that its information is from the applicant's declaration. Toyota has none.
• The register is paid per record and in Japanese. JPY 330 for an uncertified view, JPY 490 to 600 for a certificate, one company at a time.
• No accounts in the register. Full statements exist on EDINET only for companies that file securities reports. A kabushiki kaisha publishes a balance sheet (or only a summary) through the notice method it chose, and gōdō kaisha, partnership companies, and tokurei yūgen kaisha have no notice duty under the Companies Act at all.
• Gaps in coverage. Sole proprietors, civil-law partnerships, and limited liability partnerships get no corporate number, and branches never get their own.
• Dates and characters need converting. Record pages use Japanese era dates (平成31年 is 2019) and full-width digits, as in 愛知県豊田市トヨタ町１番地, and the bulk files come in Shift-JIS or Unicode.
• The official API is slow to start. The application ID is free, but issuing one takes two weeks to a month, and a request returns at most 10 numbers or 50 days of changes.

If you check one Japanese supplier a quarter, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access Japanese register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 6,802,243 Japanese entities, sourced from the official Japanese records and refreshed as new numbers and changes appear. Corporate numbers are already validated, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data that the official sources do not publish.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Japanese entity by corporate number, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no application ID to wait for. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Japanese checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=JP&registration_id=1180301018771

{
  "name": "トヨタ自動車株式会社",
  "name_kana": "トヨタジドウシャ",
  "legal_form": "株式会社",
  "registration_id": "1180301018771",
  "prefecture": "愛知県",
  "city": "豊田市"
}

Every field above is what the free record on the Corporate Number Publication Site shows. Revenue, employees, and industry codes come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the free Japanese record does not publish them.

8. Japan vs other company registers

Japan is generous with identifiers and sparing with everything else. For context: