Japan compliance for consumer brands

Take your products east

Know before you ship: the law, the trademark, the competitors and the setup cost. One product, five working days, a go / no-go verdict.

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£395, five working days, one product. If every gate comes back clear, you get a full refund. Or start with the free snapshot.

14Japanese legal and compliance gates checked

5working days, from your intake answers

£395one product, fixed price

1verdict: go, no-go, or fix these first

The problem this solves

Japan doesn’t categorise your product the way you do.

Japanese product regulation does not map onto the US or UK framework. None of it is visible from outside, and most of it gets found at customs, after the container has been paid for.

Separately, every non-Japanese seller has needed a customs representative in Japan since October 2023. And Japan is first-to-file on trademarks, so whoever registers your name owns it there, brand or not.

A wooden product can be regulated as something other than a toy. A skincare product can be regulated as something other than a cosmetic. A sentence on your packaging can move the whole product into a different Act. None of those reclassifications are guessable from the outside, and each one carries its own certification, labelling and lead time.

What gets checked

Fourteen gates, plus the trademark position.

Every gate is run against your actual product and its actual claims, not the category it sits in.

電気用品安全法

PSE — electrical safety

技適

Giteki — radio certification

薬機法

Pharmaceuticals & Medical Devices Act

食品衛生法

Food Sanitation Act

食品表示法

Food Labelling Act

家庭用品品質表示法

Household Goods Labelling

Medical device classification

Class I–IV determination

Allergen labelling

Mandatory and recommended items

Plant quarantine

Import inspection requirements

Pesticide registration

Agricultural Chemicals Regulation Act

PSLPG

Gas appliance safety

Alcohol and tobacco

Licensing requirements

ACP

Customs representative, required since Oct 2023

Trademark occupancy

J-PlatPat — the Japanese register

Every gate that fires comes back with what it requires, an indicative cost, a timeline, and who to take it to, in the order to do them in.

How it's checked

You can check the work.

A verdict you can't verify is just an opinion with an invoice attached. Everything here is built to be argued with.

法

Every finding names the law

Not "this may need certification". The statute, in Japanese with an English gloss, and the specific requirement it creates. Your freight forwarder, your lawyer or your Japanese distributor can check it against the same source.

原

Primary sources, not summaries

Checks run against the ministries and registers themselves, not against blog posts or a competitor's guide. Where a source was ambiguous or offline on the day, the report says so rather than guessing.

否

The negatives are shown too

The workbook has two tabs. Tab one is what you have to act on. Tab two is every check that was run, including the ones that came back clear, so you can see the scope of what was looked at, not just what happened to fire.

Sources the checks run against:

METI — Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry MHLW — Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare J-PlatPat — the Japanese trademark register e-Gov — the statute texts Japan Customs Consumer Affairs Agency

Compliance Flag Report

£395 · five working days · one product

One product, checked against fourteen Japanese legal and compliance gates, plus the trademark position on the Japanese register.

What you get

An Excel workbook and a phone-readable report. Every gate that fires, what it requires, an indicative cost and timeline for each fix, who to take it to, and the order to do them in.

Turnaround

Five working days, starting when your answers to the intake questions come back, not when you pay. Next working day is available at £790.

Revisions

One consolidated round, raised within 48 working hours of delivery.

Start a report →

Who does the work

You get the person doing the research.

I'm an Amazon market researcher by trade, with a background in data analysis and fraud detection at the DWP. Years of finding the one irregular record in a dataset of millions taught me how to spot risk before it becomes a problem, which is exactly what you need when you're launching a product on Amazon Japan.

Genkan Co. is me plus a tight network of local experts: native Japanese speakers who know the regulatory environment inside out. METI, MHLW, trademark law, Amazon's restricted categories. We map it all back to one question: what is actually standing between this product and the Japanese market?

Because there's no agency bloat behind this, you get direct access to the people doing the research. That's why it's £395 and five days, not £2,000 and a month of back-and-forth.

Umar Hussain

Founder, GenkanCo

What I am, and what I'm not →

Once it clears

The check is the start of the job, not the whole of it.

Once a product is cleared to sell, GenkanCo does the two pieces that come next.

Listing localisation. The Japanese listing built from scratch rather than translated: title, bullets, description, structured attributes and backend search terms, as a paste-ready sheet.

Image localisation. The product image stack rebuilt for a Japanese buyer, who reads a listing in a different order and expects different things on it.

Both are quoted separately, when you want them. Every Japanese line is written to a documented rulebook and checked by a native speaker before sign-off.

Refunds and cancellation

The terms, in plain English.

Cancel before work starts

Full refund, no questions asked.

If the report comes back clear

Full refund. If nothing in it legally requires action before you can sell in Japan, you do not pay for it, and you keep the report. Recommended-not-required findings, and an ambiguous trademark position, are not a clear result.

After delivery, where it is not clear

Not refundable, because it is research work supplied in full.

If a rush deadline is missed

The rush premium is refunded.

If a primary source is down

The Japanese trademark register schedules outages. You are told the same day and the rush premium comes back, rather than the checks being compressed.

The full terms of business are here.

Scope. GenkanCo is advisory. It is not a law firm, a certification body, or a registered Japan compliance agent, and nothing it produces is legal advice or a certification opinion. It identifies where Japanese regulation is likely to apply to a product and what would need resolving, so those questions can be taken to the right specialist. Decisions about compliance, registration and importation remain yours, taken on your own professional advice. Japan today; the EU equivalent is in build.