Japan Company Register: How to Search the Corporate Number & Touki

Japan’s company register is cheap, official and precise. Every legal entity carries a free, public Corporate Number; the full commercial register record of any company — its directors, capital, purpose, and every change since incorporation — can be viewed online for JPY 331, and certified for under JPY 600. By G7 standards, that is a bargain.

Then you ask the two questions a compliance team asks first. Who owns it? No public register in Japan records a company’s shareholders. What does it earn? Every joint-stock company is legally required to publish its balance sheet — and, by one authoritative count, about 1.8% actually do. The world’s fourth-largest economy runs on a register that will tell you who runs a company and almost nothing about who owns it or how it is doing — entirely in Japanese.

This guide covers the two identifiers, what the yen buys, the financials gap that the law forbids and reality permits, the ownership blind spot, and how Japan’s famous credit bureaus fill the void.

Two numbers, two ministries

Japan runs corporate identity through two ministries. The National Tax Agency assigns every legal entity a 13-digit Corporate Number (hōjin bangō) and publishes it, free, on the Corporate Number Publication Site — name, address, incorporation date and status, with bulk downloads and an API. It is Japan’s open identity layer, and it covers everything from listed groups to municipal bodies.

The record behind that identity sits with the Ministry of Justice: the commercial register (shōgyō tōki), maintained by the Legal Affairs Bureaus and served online through the Touki information service. Its key is the 12-digit company registration number — and here Japan did something the ACN/ABN split in Australia never managed: the Corporate Number is simply a check digit plus that registration number. The free ID resolves directly to the paid record.

A third layer aggregates: gBizINFO, run by METI, pulls together what ministries hold on each company — identity, certifications, procurement, subsidies, and financial statements where the FSA has them — free, with an API. For how the Corporate Number sits alongside identifiers worldwide, see our global tax-ID format guide.

What is free — and what JPY 331 buys

The free tier is identity plus the listed sliver. The Corporate Number site confirms an entity exists, gBizINFO adds cross-ministry colour, and EDINET — the FSA’s disclosure system — carries full audited securities reports for listed and other reporting companies at no charge.

The register itself is priced by the yen, and the schedule was last revised on 1 April 2025. Viewing a company’s complete register record online through the Touki information service costs JPY 331. A certified extract (tōki jikō shōmeisho) — the document banks and counterparties actually ask for — is JPY 490 if requested online and collected at a counter, JPY 520 online-to-post, or JPY 600 requested in person. A company seal certificate runs JPY 420–500.

Set against the series: Australia meters directors and shareholders at A$9–A$36, Singapore sells the whole record for S$5.50, and Japan sells its record for JPY 331 — but Japan’s record has no shareholders in it to sell. See our Australia guide for the regional contrast.

How many companies exist

The National Tax Agency’s most recent Corporation Sample Survey counted 2,956,717 active companies for FY2023 — a record, and the eleventh straight annual increase — of which 61% reported a loss. New formations run at record pace too: 157,011 new legal entities in 2025, the third record year in a row. But the mix is shifting. The classic joint-stock company (KK) fell for a second year to 100,558 formations, while the cheaper, more private GK (gōdō kaisha) hit an all-time high of 44,991 — nearly three in ten new companies.

The company types you will meet

Financials: listed and public companies

For companies that file securities reports, Japan is fully transparent and free. EDINET holds annual securities reports (yūka shōken hōkokusho), quarterly and extraordinary reports, and large-shareholding reports, in machine-readable form; the exchanges add timely disclosure. This population — roughly 4,000 reporting companies — is where global analysts already look, and it is genuinely well served.

The rest of the article is about the other 2.95 million.

Financials: private companies

On paper, Japan is stricter than Australia or Singapore. Article 440 of the Companies Act requires every KK to publish its balance sheet after the annual general meeting — large companies (capital of JPY 500 million or more, or liabilities of JPY 20 billion or more) the profit-and-loss statement too — in the Official Gazette, a daily newspaper, or online. Non-compliance carries a fine of up to JPY 1 million.

In practice, the duty is close to dead letter. Tokyo Shoko Research’s analysis found that of roughly 2.18 million KKs that should have published in the Official Gazette, about 40,000 did — 1.8%. The fine is almost never imposed. GKs and legacy yugen companies carry no duty at all. So the working reality for a credit or KYB team is stark: unless the counterparty is a securities-report filer, or one of the small minority that publishes voluntarily on its own website, there are no public financial statements to pull — the private financials do not exist in the public record, and never did.

Shareholders: not in the register

Here Japan diverges from every other country in this series. The commercial register lists a KK’s directors and its representative director, its capital, its purpose and its history — and not one shareholder. The shareholder register (kabunushi meibo) is a private document the company must keep and shareholders may inspect; it is filed nowhere public. Brazil prints partners on a free card, Singapore sells the shareholder list for S$5.50, Australia meters it at A$9. Japan does not record it at all.

The exceptions are the listed sliver — large-shareholding reports at 5% on EDINET, and annual securities reports listing major holders — and the sole-proprietor-style GK, whose registered representative member is often its owner. For a typical private KK, resolving ownership means the company’s own register, its tax filings, or the credit bureaus’ field research.

UBO access: the voluntary list

Japan’s answer to the beneficial-ownership question is the Beneficial Owner List system, in operation since 31 January 2022. A KK may prepare a list of its beneficial owners — natural persons holding, directly or indirectly, more than 50% or more than 25% of voting rights — and submit it to its Legal Affairs Bureau, which checks it against supporting documents, holds it, and issues a registrar-certified copy. It is free.

Three words define its limits: voluntary, KK-only, company-only. Filing is at the company’s option. GKs and other forms are excluded. And the certified copy is issued to the company that filed it — a document it can hand to its bank, not a register a third party can search. The Bankers Association asked for it to be made mandatory before launch; it was not. Where Singapore’s controllers register is complete but sealed, Japan’s is open in principle and empty in practice.

The direction of travel is, if anything, towards more privacy on the people who are registered: since 1 October 2024, a KK’s representative director may mask the street-level part of their home address on the register, showing only the municipality. Uptake has been modest — roughly 15,000 masks in the first year, and a Tokyo Shoko Research survey found under 7% of companies using it — but the register’s traditional role in verifying a representative’s identity is weakening at the margin. For how Japan compares globally, see our guide to beneficial-ownership registers worldwide.

Compliance and integrity signals

The integrity layer is broader than the register’s silence on owners suggests — the signals are just scattered across ministries. Start with status. Dissolution, liquidation and the commencement of bankruptcy or civil-rehabilitation proceedings are recorded on the register; the proceedings themselves are announced in the Official Gazette, whose online edition is searchable. And once a year the Justice Ministry runs a purge worth knowing about: every KK that has filed no registration for twelve years (five for general associations and foundations) is gazetted and, absent a response within two months, deemed dissolved by the registrar. In 2025 the notice went out on 10 October with an 11 December cut-off. A deemed-dissolution entry is therefore a precise free flag: this company filed nothing for over a decade.

The tax office offers a liveness signal rather than a debtor list. Japan does not publish tax delinquents by name — that signal reaches the market only through the bureaus — but the NTA’s Qualified Invoice Issuer site (the 2023 invoice system) lets anyone confirm, free and with bulk data and an API, that a registration number T + Corporate Number belongs to a live, consumption-tax-registered business, and whether that registration has been revoked. Search is by number, not name — by design — so pair it with the Corporate Number lookup.

Licences are the strongest free layer, and they reach beyond finance. The Financial Services Agency publishes its lists of registered financial-instruments businesses and a warning list of unregistered operators — licence-in, warning-out, increasingly relevant as regulators flag GKs used in unregistered investment schemes. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism runs a free enterprise-information search covering twelve licensed sectors — construction contractors (Japan’s largest licensed industry, roughly 480,000 permit holders), real-estate brokers, condominium managers, surveyors and construction consultants — showing permit numbers, representatives, capital, permitted trades and expiry dates. And, in a separate system most foreign guides miss, MLIT operates an official Negative Information Search Site: administrative penalties and suspensions of designation (shimei teishi) that bar a contractor from public tenders — the closest thing Japan has to Brazil’s CEIS, free and searchable, though it covers MLIT’s domain rather than all public procurement.

Two credit-adjacent registers sit with the Legal Affairs Bureaus and are priced like the main register: the movables assignment register and the receivables assignment register (certificates from JPY 700 and JPY 450 respectively), Japan’s partial analogue of a security-interest search — useful, but far narrower than Australia’s PPSR. What Japan does not have is a public register of disqualified directors: a person barred by a court from managing companies appears on no searchable list, so that check, like ownership, runs through the bureaus.

The credit-bureau layer

Every gap above explains why Japan has the deepest commercial credit-bureau market in the world. Teikoku Databank and Tokyo Shoko Research maintain files on millions of companies built from field interviews, voluntary financial disclosure and decades of proprietary collection — including the private-company financials and shareholder details that no public register holds. Their reports are the de facto standard for Japanese counterparty due diligence, and much of the market’s aggregate intelligence (including the 1.8% figure above) originates with them.

The trade-off is the one this series keeps returning to: bureau data is contributed and researched, not registry-sourced. It is often the only place to find a private KK’s numbers — and it is not an official record, carries no provenance chain to a government filing, and lives in Japanese. For a foreign compliance team, the practical stack is register for identity and directors, EDINET for the listed sliver, and a bureau or a registry-grounded provider for everything the state does not record.

The corporate linkage gap

Japanese corporate structure is famously networked — parent-subsidiary groups, cross-shareholdings, keiretsu ties — and the register describes each company as an island. With no shareholders in the record, the register cannot show a domestic parent, let alone a foreign one; the group exists in securities reports for the listed few and in bureau files for the rest.

What’s changing

• The register got slightly more expensive, and slightly less revealing. Certificate fees rose on 1 April 2025 (the online-view price held at JPY 331), and since October 2024 representative directors can mask their street address on the record.
• The GK is eating the KK. GK formations hit a record 44,991 in 2025 while KK formations fell for a second year — shifting more of the economy into a form with no publication duty and no BO-list eligibility.
• Beneficial-owner transparency remains parked. The 2022 BO List system is still voluntary and company-only; there is no public UBO register on the legislative horizon.
• Open data is improving where the state already holds data. gBizINFO and the Corporate Number API make identity-level integration easy; nothing comparable exists for ownership or private financials.

How to access Japanese data at scale

Identity at scale is solved: the Corporate Number bulk files and API cover every entity, free. Register records scale by the yen — JPY 331 a company, in Japanese, one at a time or through licensed intermediaries. Beyond that, scale means the bureaus or a multi-source provider, because the layers you most need — owners, private financials, group — are not in any public system to be bulk-downloaded from. For how registry access compares country by country, see our business-registry API map and the primer on why registry provenance matters.

The Legal Affairs Bureau register vs Global Database

The honest way to frame this: for a single Japanese company’s official record, go to the source. The Ministry of Justice register is the authentic record, it is cheap, and a certified extract carries legal weight nothing else can. Where a multi-source, registry-grounded layer earns its place is everything the register does not hold, and everything you need to do at scale or in English.

Read across the rows and the pattern is clear. Where the register has the data, it is the better single-company source and we say so. Where it does not — owners, private financials, group — nobody has a public Japanese record to point to, and the choice is between researched bureau data and a registry-grounded layer that will show its sources and admit its gaps.

Limitations of Japanese company data

Every source in this guide has a ceiling, and a due-diligence file should record it. These are the limits that apply to the official record, and the ones that apply to any provider — including us.

The register is a legal record, not a live one. A register entry reflects the last filing, not the current state of the company. Directors must be re-registered on reappointment, but between filings the record can be years stale, and a company that has stopped trading can look identical to one that is thriving until the twelve-year dormancy purge catches it. Address masking, since October 2024, removes one more field that used to help confirm the person behind the name.

Ownership cannot be verified from public records. With no shareholders in the register and a beneficial-owner list that is voluntary and company-only, no third party can independently confirm who owns a private KK from official Japanese sources. Any ownership claim about a private company — from a bureau, from a data provider, or from the company itself — rests on documents the company chose to disclose or on field research. It should be treated as reported, not verified, unless it comes from a filing (a securities report, a foreign register in the chain, a court record).

Private-company financials, where they exist, are unaudited and self-published. The 1.8% who publish do so in the Official Gazette or on their own websites, without audit for most, and with no standard format. Figures for the other 98% originate with the credit bureaus — researched and, in many cases, supplied by the company — not from any statutory filing. They are useful; they are not provenance-grade.

The name problem is real. Japanese company names carry kanji, kana and romanised forms, and the register holds only the Japanese. Two entities can share an English rendering; one entity can appear under several. Matching a Japanese counterparty from a Latin-script name alone, without a Corporate Number, is a genuine source of false positives and misses. The Corporate Number is the only safe join key.

The GK is a growing blind spot. Nearly three in ten new companies now take a form that registers only its representative member, has no publication duty, and is ineligible for the BO List. Everything above about ownership and financials is worse for GKs, and their share of the register is rising.

What that means for what we can promise. For Japan, Global Database will give you identity, directors, capital and history from the register with a source and timestamp on every field; listed-company financials from EDINET-grade filings; group linkage where a chain reaches a jurisdiction whose register records ownership; and status, licence and dormancy signals from the official sources above. What we will not do is fill the register’s silences with estimates: where a private KK’s owner or accounts are not in any official record, the field is empty and marked as such, not modelled. That is a limitation by design — and, for a compliance file, the point.

What the register won’t tell you

Frequently asked questions