Umar Hussain

Where this comes from

I'm a data analyst. I spent my career in fraud and reporting at the DWP — the Department for Work and Pensions, the UK government department that runs benefits and pensions. The work was pattern-finding: taking a large, messy dataset, locating the thing in it that doesn't add up, and writing that up clearly enough that somebody else could act on it and defend the decision when challenged.

Two habits came out of that and both of them are the product here. Show the negatives as well as the positives — a finding you can't see the scope of is a finding you can't trust. And cite the source every time, so the reader can go and check rather than take your word for it.

Why Japan

Japanese product regulation is a pattern-finding problem wearing a language barrier. The rules aren't secret. METI publishes the electrical appliance categories. The MHLW publishes the food and pharmaceutical rules. J-PlatPat, the trademark register, is free and open to anyone.

The difficulty is that they're spread across dozens of separate sources, written for Japanese domestic manufacturers rather than foreign brand owners, and mostly not in English. So a brand owner in Manchester or Denver asking a simple question — can I sell this in Japan, and what will it cost me to get there — has no single place to get the answer. They find out at customs instead.

That gap is the whole business. It isn't a clever idea; it's an assembly job that nobody had bothered to do at a price a small brand can pay.

What I am not

This matters more than the paragraph above it, so it gets its own section.

• I am not a lawyer. Nothing GenkanCo produces is legal advice, and it should not be relied on as a substitute for it.
• I am not a certification body. I cannot issue a PSE mark, a Giteki number, or any other approval. I can tell you that you need one, roughly what it costs, and who issues it.
• I am not a registered Japanese compliance agent and cannot act as your importer of record or customs representative.
• I am not a native Japanese speaker. I read Japanese sources and I know the market, but where a report turns on a nuance of Japanese, a native speaker checks it before it ships. I would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.

The model is flag and refer. I find the gates that apply to your product, price them, sequence them, and tell you who to take each one to. What you do about them is your decision, taken on your own professional advice.

How a report actually gets made

There's software behind this — a pipeline that pulls source documents, runs the fourteen gate checks and drafts the workbook. It does the retrieval and the first pass. It is not the product.

Every report is read end to end by me before it goes out, and the judgement calls — is this claim a medicine claim, is this trademark close enough to be a problem, is this cost estimate honest — are mine. Where I'm not certain, the report says I'm not certain and tells you who can be.

The company

GenkanCo is the trading name of Umar Hussain, a sole trader registered in the United Kingdom. Genkan (玄関) is the entryway of a Japanese house — the threshold where you stop, take your shoes off, and deal with what's required before you go any further in. It seemed like the right name.