Why you can’t verify a Japanese company from Google alone

A Japanese company has approached you, or you have found one you want to buy from. Before money moves, you want to know it is real and solvent. So you search the name, find a website in Japanese, run it through a translator, and end up roughly where you started — with a plausible-looking company and no way to tell whether “plausible” means anything.

This is not a failure of your research. Japan keeps unusually complete corporate records. They are simply arranged in a way that defeats searching, and the parts that matter most are the parts a search engine has never seen.

What can you actually find for free?

Three fields, and they are worth having.

Japan’s National Tax Agency runs a public corporate number site. Every registered corporation has a 13-digit corporate number, and the site publishes what it calls the basic three items: the registered name, the address of the head office or principal office, and the corporate number itself. An English transliteration appears if the company has registered one. There is a last-updated date, and you can see the history of name and address changes.

That is genuinely useful. If a company gives you a corporate number and the registry returns a different name or a different address, you have learned something important in thirty seconds. If a company cannot give you a corporate number at all, that is also informative.

What the free registry will never tell you: how much capital the company has, who its directors are, when it was incorporated, what business it is registered to conduct, or whether control has changed hands. Those are all recorded — just not there.

Where is the rest of it?

In the commercial register held by the Legal Affairs Bureau, and you have to request it one company at a time.

The document is called a certificate of registered matters — in practice everyone says tōkibo or tōkibo tōhon. It is the authoritative record, it is public, anyone may request any company’s copy without showing an interest, and it is not expensive. What it is not is searchable from your browser in London or Chicago.

The certificate fees above took effect on 1 April 2025; the ¥330 online viewing fee took effect on 1 April 2026.

That last row catches people out. The Registration Information Provision Service gives you the same content as a PDF, immediately, for the lowest price — but with no seal it is information, not evidence. For your own due diligence that is usually fine. For a bank, a court, a licensing authority, or anywhere a document has to prove something, you need the sealed certificate.

What does the registry document actually tell you?

Considerably more than a Western company-search summary, and the history is the interesting part.

• Registered name and address — including every previous name and address, with dates
• Date of incorporation — the real one, which often differs from the “founded” date on the website
• Stated business purposes — an itemised list of what the company registered itself to do
• Capital — and any increases or reductions, with dates
• Directors and representative directors — with appointment and resignation dates
• Method of public notice — where the company says it publishes official announcements
• Branch offices, mergers, dissolutions where applicable

The history is where the signal lives. A company that changed its name twice and its representative director three times in four years is telling you something a current-state summary would hide. So is a company whose registered purposes were amended last month to include the business it is now approaching you about.

Why can’t you find their revenue?

Because for most Japanese companies it was never published anywhere indexable.

Japan’s Companies Act requires joint-stock companies to publish an annual financial notice after the shareholders’ meeting. But the permitted methods include publication in the Official Gazette (Kanpo) or in a daily newspaper — not only on a website. A notice that appeared in the Gazette is public in the legal sense and effectively invisible in the practical one. It is not a searchable filing database in the way Companies House or EDGAR is.

If you need financial position on a non-listed company, the realistic routes are commercial credit reference agencies, the company itself, or inference from what is observable. All three are research, not lookup — which is exactly why “I couldn’t find their accounts online” tells you nothing about the company.

Why does the same company appear under several names?

Because Japanese company names carry variations that collapse badly in a spreadsheet, and matching them is a skill rather than a string comparison.

• Where the corporate form sits. 株式会社 (kabushiki kaisha) can come before or after the name. The same company may be written 株式会社山田 in one document and 山田株式会社 in another, depending on registration.
• Old and new character forms. Family names in company names frequently use traditional characters — 髙 rather than 高, 﨑 rather than 崎. Systems substitute the modern form silently, and now you have two records.
• Script choice. The same name may appear in kanji, hiragana, katakana or Latin script across a website, a business card and the register.
• Romanisation. There is no single official system, so the English name on the website may not match any transliteration you would generate yourself.

The corporate number solves all of this, which is why it is the first thing to ask for. It is stable, unique, and it does not care how the name is written.

Does a website tell you anything?

Less than in most markets, and the direction of the error is unusual.

In many countries a thin, dated website is a warning sign. In Japan it frequently is not. Established mid-sized manufacturers with substantial revenue often run sites that look like they were built in 2009, because their customers arrive through trade associations, exhibitions and long-standing relationships rather than search. Meanwhile, a company that exists mostly as a well-designed English landing page deserves more scrutiny, not less.

What is worth reading on a Japanese corporate site is the company profile page — 会社概要. Established companies list capital, incorporation date, representative, employee count, main banks and main customers there as a matter of convention. Cross-checking that page against the registry document is a fast and revealing exercise, because the two are meant to agree.

What would a thorough check actually involve?

In rough order of cost, and you can stop at any point:

1. Corporate number checked against the public registry — free, immediate
2. Certificate of registered matters obtained and read, including the history
3. Company profile page cross-checked against the register
4. Trading footprint assembled: industry directories, association membership, exhibitor lists, trade press
5. Credit reference data where commercially available
6. Litigation and adverse-media search — conducted in Japanese, because that is where it would appear
7. Someone visits the registered address and photographs it

Steps one to three answer “is this a real, registered company that is what it says it is”. Steps four to six answer “does it actually trade, and is there anything unpleasant in its history”. Step seven answers “is anyone there”, which for a company you have never met and are about to pay is not a paranoid question.

When is it worth paying someone to do this?

When the amount at risk is larger than the cost of the check, which is a low bar.

Realistically, doing steps one to seven yourself from outside Japan means requesting a document from a bureau whose interface is Japanese-only, reading a register written in legal Japanese, and running adverse-media searches in a language you do not read. It is not impossible. It is a genuinely poor use of a week.

Our company verification service starts at $290 for the registry work and a plain-language conclusion, and goes to $1,500 if you want someone to physically visit the address and photograph the premises. We will also tell you what we could not confirm — a report that finds nothing wrong is a result, and we would rather deliver that than pad it.