National Tax Agency (NTA) corporate-number systemBacked by company registrations held by the Ministry of Justice’s Legal Affairs Bureaus (法務局)
Japan corporate data is sourced from the National Tax Agency’s corporate-number system. Search, Lite Profile, and Enhanced Profile are all supported across V1 and V2. Data quality varies by company size: listed companies expose their top 10 shareholders, and small private companies generally have no shareholder or director data.
Data quality improvements in progress. JP responses are being refined for richer structured data and improved standard-value mappings; release notes will follow when updates ship.
JP source data does not include a discrete legal-form field; legalForm.normalized is inferred from the Japanese-script company-name suffix, and legalForm.original carries the literal Japanese suffix where present.
Japanese suffix
legalForm.normalized
English equivalent
Notes
株式会社
Private Limited Company
Kabushiki Kaisha (K.K.)
The default Japanese corporate form; literally “stock company” by name but in practice ~99% are private. Can appear at the start (株式会社リクルートホールディングス) or end (ソニーグループ株式会社) of the name. Public / listed status is a separate axis determined by stock-exchange listing, not by the form itself.
合同会社
Private Limited Company
Godo Kaisha (G.K.)
Japanese LLC, introduced 2006. Often used by inbound subsidiaries (e.g. Apple Japan, Google Japan).
有限会社
Private Limited Company
Yugen Kaisha (Y.K.)
Legacy limited company. New registrations disallowed since 2006 but many existing entities remain.
(no matching suffix)
Other
—
Fallback for special-purpose or imported entities. legalForm.normalized is never null — Other is used when no specific value fits, and the raw suffix remains in legalForm.original.
Despite 株式会社 literally translating as “stock company”, it maps to Private Limited Company rather than Public Limited Company. Japan’s statutory regime treats 株式会社 as a unified umbrella corporate form, with listing being a separate state — unlike China where joint-stock (股份有限公司) is statutorily distinct from LLC (有限责任公司) and only the former can be publicly traded.
JP activities are returned as a comma-joined string of numeric industry codes (e.g. "110,111,112,115,...,315") on activities[].description. No standardised classification scheme (NACE / NAICS) is provided for JP — activities[].code, activities[].classificationScheme, and activities[].type are typically null.
JP address is returned in the standard V2 structured shape on both Lite Profile and Enhanced Profile (most other Asia-Pacific jurisdictions return only the flat fullAddress on Lite — JP is the exception).
V2 field
Populated
Notes
fullAddress
✓
E.g. "1-9-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo"
region
✓
Prefecture, with the trailing Prefecture removed
city
✓ where present
Segment ending -shi / containing City
municipality
✓ where present
Segment ending -ku
streetName, streetNumber
✓ where present
Parsed from the street segment
buildingName
✓ where present
Any building segment preceding the street segment
country
"Japan"
isoCode
"JP"
postcode, secondaryPostalCode
—
Not surfaced for JP
Typical Latin form: "1-9-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo". Typical Japanese form: "東京都千代田区丸の内１丁目９番２号".
Japanese-script registered name (e.g. "株式会社リクルートホールディングス"). For JP entities the source treats the Japanese name as primary, so it occupies companyName.
englishName
englishNameField
Latin-script English name (e.g. "Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd.") when distinct from companyName.
aliases[] (type: Kana)
aliasesField
Phonetic Kana variant of the name where the source surfaces one.
For JP entities you should treat englishName (not companyName) as the Latin-script form for display in English-language contexts.
JP entities expose representatives on V2 representatives.individuals[] with the Latin and Japanese name pair populated. Roles are free-text labels (e.g. "President and CEO", "Director"). JP companies typically surface a single representative even for very large listed entities.
V2 shareholdings[] is populated for listed companies (and many mid-caps) but capped at the top 10 shareholders. For listed entities, the per-shareholder percentages typically sum to 40–60% rather than 100%.Shareholder names occasionally carry Japanese-language parentheticals such as "(Permanent Agent: …)" or "(Standing Proxy: …)" on custody-bank and foreign-institutional holders. These are returned as-is.
