Japan Liquor License Signals

Official Japanese liquor-sales-license events, normalized as source-attributed B2B signals.

The Actor follows the National Tax Agency's public monthly lists of new and changed liquor-sales licenses across all 47 prefectures. It returns events that are useful for early commercial research: online-sales licenses, wholesale and import/export licenses, business transfers, incorporation, relocation, condition changes, and optionally every general retail new license.

This is not a static liquor-store directory, a contact database, a legal opinion, or evidence that a business is ready to buy a product. It is an official-source event feed for a customer's own lawful research and outreach workflow.

Best fit

• Japanese liquor wholesalers and import/export operators seeking newly licensed counterparties.
• Alcohol-EC platforms, fulfilment providers, cold-chain logistics, packaging, POS and payments teams.
• B2B lead-research, market-intelligence, investment, and Japanese-sake import research teams.

The default purposely excludes ordinary general retail only new licenses, such as routine convenience-store openings. Set includeGeneralRetailNewLicenses to true if comprehensive coverage is needed.

Signals

Each Dataset row represents one published licence record. eventType is the highest-priority signal; eventTypes retains every matching signal without duplicating the source row.

Signal	Official basis
new_license	処理区分: 新規
online_sales_license	種類区分 contains 通信販売
wholesale_license	卸小売等区分 contains 卸売 or 卸・小売
import_export_license	種類区分 contains 輸出入
business_transfer	処理区分: 事業譲渡
incorporation	処理区分: 法人成り等
relocation	処理区分: 移転
license_change	処理区分: 条件緩和 or 条件解除

Rows include the published business/company name, any corporate number printed in the official cell, address, prefecture, effective and application dates, licence categories, Japanese processing category, an English summary, and complete source provenance. The Actor does not call a separate company database: a corporateNumber is returned only when it is already printed in the NTA source.

Official source, coverage and use conditions

The source of truth is the NTA's national liquor-sales-license index. It links to 12 regional tax bureaux and their prefecture-level monthly PDF lists. The NTA defines the published fields, including effective date, application date, licensee name, selling location, trade category, license category, and processing category. Regional pages state that the lists are normally updated at month-end and retained for one year.

NTA website content may be used under the Public Data Terms of Use (Version 1.0), unless a page says otherwise. The terms require attribution and clear disclosure of processing; every output carries both. The Actor requests only ordinary public NTA HTML and PDFs, does not bypass a login, and does not rely on a portal's scraping terms.

Some records concern sole proprietors and can contain a published name and address. The Actor does not add phone numbers, email addresses, or personal enrichment. Users remain responsible for their lawful purpose, privacy obligations, and any marketing/outreach rules that apply to them.

Input

{
  "prefectures": ["東京都", "大阪府", "北海道"],
  "sourceMonth": "",
  "signalTypes": ["online_sales_license", "wholesale_license", "import_export_license"],
  "includeGeneralRetailNewLicenses": false,
  "maxSignals": 10000
}

• prefectures: optional; blank scans all 47 prefectures.
• sourceMonth: optional YYYY-MM coverage month while it is still retained by the NTA; blank selects the latest available publication per prefecture.
• signalTypes: optional list of the eight stable signal types; blank selects all.
• includeGeneralRetailNewLicenses: defaults to false to preserve the B2B-signal focus.
• maxSignals: 1–10,000 Dataset safety limit.

Output example

{
  "eventType": "import_export_license",
  "eventTypes": ["import_export_license", "online_sales_license", "wholesale_license", "new_license"],
  "businessName": "株式会社出光商会",
  "corporateNumber": "1010001065387",
  "address": "港区芝５丁目１３番１８号",
  "prefecture": "東京都",
  "effectiveDate": "2026-06-01",
  "applicationDate": "2026-04-21",
  "licenseTradeCategory": "卸・小売",
  "licenseCategory": "輸出入・一般・通信販売",
  "processingCategory": "新規",
  "englishSummary": "Official NTA record: ...",
  "source": {
    "provider": "National Tax Agency, Japan",
    "sourcePdfUrl": "https://www.nta.go.jp/...",
    "sourcePublicationDate": "2026-07-31",
    "sourceCoverageMonth": "2026-06",
    "sourceConfidence": "official_text_pdf"
  }
}

SUMMARY records source-row count, scanned/failed publications, emitted signals, skipped low-intent general-retail rows, and run duration. A publication failure is explicit; it is never silently treated as no signal.

Pay-per-event model

The Actor charges two custom Apify PPE events, with no apify-default-dataset-item charge:

• official-publication-scanned — $0.02 for one successfully parsed NTA prefecture PDF.
• liquor-license-signal-emitted — $0.01 for one emitted Dataset signal.

The runtime refuses an unexpected PPE event configuration, so a default Dataset-item charge cannot be added silently.

Development

npm ci
npm test
npm run build
PDF_EXTRACTOR_PYTHON=/path/to/python3 npm run e2e:sample

The production Docker image installs a pinned pdfplumber extractor. It reads each source PDF from memory and does not persist downloaded PDFs or add corporate-number enrichment.