Japan Company Registry: The Complete Guide to KK, GK and Corporate Number

Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy and home to over 3 million active companies. Every commercial entity must register with the Touki system, Japan’s Ministry of Justice commercial registry. The registry is public, accessible online, and contains confirmed legal details including company name, address, representative directors, and registered capital.

In practice, Japanese KYB is significantly harder than the registry suggests. Three structural features create real obstacles. First, no shareholder data is in the public registry — for any entity type. Second, Godo Kaisha (GK) companies have no public financial disclosure obligation, making private company financials largely invisible. Third, Japan has no public beneficial ownership register, with reforms still ongoing following FATF criticism in 2021. Add Japanese-only documentation and the complexity of keiretsu cross-shareholding structures, and Japan consistently requires more specialist input per entity than any major EU registry.

This guide covers everything compliance, data, and product teams need to work with Japanese company data in 2026 — from the Touki extract to the Corporate Number, from KK vs GK transparency differences to the keiretsu ownership problem.

Japan’s corporate data is distributed across two primary systems that serve different purposes. Both are necessary for comprehensive company verification.

Japan’s Companies Act defines four entity types. For KYB purposes, the most important distinction is between KK (which must publish financial statements) and GK (which does not).

Japan’s registry documents are all in Japanese. There is no official English-language version of any commercial registry document. All costs are in yen.

In every major EU jurisdiction, some version of shareholder data is in the public registry. In Japan, no shareholder information is disclosed in the commercial registry for any entity type. The shareholder registry (株假名簿, kabunushi meibo) is an internally maintained document that companies are required to keep but not required to make public.

For a listed KK, major shareholders holding 5% or more are disclosed in the annual securities report filed with EDINET — and the top 10 shareholders are also disclosed. Below 5%, nothing is public. For a private KK or GK, no shareholder information is accessible from any official public source.

Japan does not have a public beneficial ownership register. This is one of the most significant gaps in Japan’s AML/CFT framework and was explicitly criticised in FATF’s Fourth Round Mutual Evaluation Report (August 2021), which rated Japan as «Partially Compliant» on Recommendation 24 (beneficial ownership of legal persons).

In response, the Ministry of Justice introduced the Beneficial Ownership of Legal Persons List System in January 2022. Companies must include beneficial ownership declarations — natural persons holding more than 25% directly or indirectly — as part of their commercial registration procedures. This data is available to financial institutions conducting customer due diligence. It is not publicly searchable.

Japan uses the Japan Standard Industrial Classification (日本標準産業分類, JSIC) — a 4-digit industry code assigned by the government and recorded in tax and statistical systems. JSIC aligns broadly with ISIC Rev. 4 but has Japan-specific subdivisions. It is not recorded in the Touki commercial registry itself, but appears in the Corporate Number database (NTA) and statistical filings. For data pipelines doing sector classification on Japanese entities, JSIC is the primary code system — not NACE or SIC. The NTA Corporate Number API returns the JSIC-equivalent industry description for most entities.

Japan’s standard corporate fiscal year runs April to March. The majority of listed Japanese KK companies — including most large industrials, banks, and insurers — follow this April–March cycle. Annual securities reports (Yukashoken Hokokusho) are therefore due by late June each year. AGMs cluster in June. EDINET filing volumes peak in June–July. For compliance teams building monitoring schedules or account refresh cycles on Japanese entities, this means financial data is typically 3–4 months staler in Q1 (January–March) than at any other time of year. Not all companies follow the April–March cycle — companies can choose any month-end — but the majority do.

EDINET provides a free machine-readable API at api.edinet-fsa.go.jp. Listed company filings are available in structured XBRL format — meaning balance sheets, P&L statements, and segment data can be pulled programmatically without PDF parsing. The API is in Japanese but the data schema is well-documented. This is Japan’s closest equivalent to France’s Sirene API — but limited entirely to listed companies. Key endpoints: document list by date range, document metadata by EDINET code, and full XBRL filing download. Rate limits apply but are generous for research use. For private KK and all GK companies, the EDINET API returns nothing.

Every change to a company’s Touki registration — a director appointment, address change, capital increase, representative director change — must be formally filed with the Legal Affairs Bureau within 2 weeks of the event. In practice, most companies use a Shiho Shoshi (司法書士士士士, judicial scrivener) — a licensed professional who handles registry filings. The Shiho Shoshi prepares documents, applies the company seal, and submits to the Bureau. Processing at the Bureau typically takes 3–7 business days. The result: a director change that occurred on 1 April may not appear in the Touki extract until 20 April or later. For time-sensitive KYB decisions — particularly director screening — always ask the company to confirm current directors directly and treat the Touki extract as a recent-history document rather than a real-time record.

Even for listed Japanese companies — where major shareholders above 5% are publicly disclosed — identifying the ultimate beneficial owner is complicated by Japan’s legacy of keiretsu cross-shareholding. A keiretsu is a network of companies with mutual equity stakes and interlocking business relationships, typically centred around a major bank.

At their peak in 1988, cross-shareholdings represented more than half the value of the Japanese stock market. Following corporate governance reforms — particularly the Corporate Governance Code (2015) and Tokyo Stock Exchange pressure on companies to justify or unwind strategic holdings — the keiretsu has been unwinding. But it has not disappeared.

The keiretsu unwind is accelerating. Major Japanese insurers were ordered by the FSA in 2024 to accelerate the dissolution of strategic holdings following price-fixing allegations linked to cross-shareholding relationships. The four largest insurers alone held approximately ¥6.5 trillion (US$43 billion) in strategic shareholdings as of early 2024.

Japan has a binary financial disclosure regime. The gap between listed and private companies is starker than any major EU registry.

Japan has three primary insolvency procedures, governed by separate statutes. Unlike France (BODACC) or Spain (BORME), there is no structured free machine-readable gazette for insolvency events. The Official Gazette (官园, Kanpo) at kanpou.npb.go.jp is the only official publication source — free, but Japanese-only, unstructured, and not designed for bulk monitoring.

Foreign companies operating in Japan can choose between three structures, each with different registry implications. The Touki system records all three, but the data available and the KYB approach differs significantly.

The Touki extract confirms that a company exists and who its representative director is. It does not identify shareholders, financial condition, or ultimate beneficial owner. Using the Touki extract alone as the basis for a KYB decision is comparable to using only an address confirmation — it verifies existence, nothing more.

These are two different identifiers. The 13-digit Corporate Number is from the NTA and is searchable free. The 12-digit commercial registration number is used in the Touki system for document requests. Both are needed. Systems that store only one create gaps.

Apple Japan GK, Amazon Japan GK, Goldman Sachs Japan GK, Costco Japan GK — major multinationals use GK precisely because it has no financial disclosure obligation. A GK counterparty with no public financial data is not necessarily a risk — it may be a significant foreign subsidiary. Always identify the parent company and review at group level.

Japanese names have multiple romanisation systems (Hepburn, Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki) and the romanisation of the same name can vary between documents. Yamada Taro may appear as Yamada Taro, Yamada Taroh, or Yamada Tarou. Screening without fuzzy matching for Japanese name variants produces false negatives.

Yugen Kaisha (YK) entities cannot be newly registered since 2006 but existing YKs continue to operate. Some YKs have not updated their registry since the Companies Act revision and may show outdated director information. YKs that wish to change their corporate structure must convert to KK or GK — conversion triggers a fresh registration and provides a more current record.

For listed Japanese companies, the disclosed major shareholders are often themselves Japanese corporations in a cross-shareholding network. A shareholder ownership graph of a major listed KK may require resolving 4–6 additional layers of Japanese corporate entities before reaching a natural person. Each layer requires its own registry lookup and potentially its own credit bureau check.

Zephira connects directly to the Touki system, NTA Corporate Number database, and EDINET, normalises Japanese-language output into a unified English-language entity model, and delivers via REST API or bulk file. For the ownership and financial gaps that official sources cannot fill, Zephira supplements with structured data from Japanese credit bureau partnerships and corporate linkage analysis across the full ownership chain.