Japan Recall Monitor — Vehicles, Food & Consumer Products

Japan Recall Monitor turns Japan's official product-recall registers into clean, machine-readable JSON. It reads the MLIT motor vehicle recall database (cars, trucks, motorcycles, child seats and tyres) and the Consumer Affairs Agency recall site (food, appliances, household goods, clothing, health products and more), and returns one consistent record shape for every recall — with English structural fields, ISO dates, affected unit counts and chassis-number ranges. Hit Start with the defaults to see real records in under a minute.

Both registers are Japanese-language, session-based government sites with no official bulk export, which is why this data is essentially absent from English-language compliance tooling. Running it on Apify gives you scheduling, a REST API, webhooks, and integrations with Zapier, Make, Slack and n8n — so a daily check for new Japanese recalls becomes a five-minute setup.

Why use Japan Recall Monitor?

• Import and resale compliance. If you sell Japanese-market products — cars, appliances, food, baby gear — you need to know the moment a recall is filed in Japan. This is the only structured feed of both registers.
• Used-car and parts exporters. Vehicle records include the type designation (型式), trade name, production period and the exact chassis-number ranges affected, so you can screen inventory against open recalls.
• Product-safety and regulatory intelligence. Track defect trends by manufacturer, component or category, and cross-reference Japanese filings with FDA/RAPEX data.
• Food safety and allergen monitoring. Consumer Affairs Agency food recalls carry the reason, the affected lot/JAN codes and the remedy offered.
• AI agents and MCP. Every Actor on Apify is callable as an MCP tool, so an agent can answer "has this model been recalled in Japan?" against the primary source instead of guessing.
• Insurers, law firms and researchers. A dated, citable record set with a link back to the official page and the original notification PDF.

How to use Japan Recall Monitor

1. Click Try for free / Start — the defaults pull the most recent motor vehicle and consumer product recalls.
2. Pick your data sources: motor vehicles, consumer products (incl. food), child seats, tyres.
3. Narrow the run — a date range, a manufacturer, a type designation, a product category, or a Japanese keyword.
4. Set Maximum results. This is the only thing that determines what the run costs.
5. Run it, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML — or wire it to a webhook and get new recalls pushed to you.
6. To monitor continuously, open the Schedule tab and run it daily with a date range like "the last 7 days".

Input

All fields are optional; the Actor ships with working defaults.

Field	Type	Description
sources	array	Which registers to read: automobile, consumerProducts, childSeat, tire. Default: vehicles + consumer products.
maxItems	integer	Hard cap on returned records across all sources. Default 100.
notificationDateFrom / notificationDateTo	string	YYYY-MM-DD bounds on the notification date (MLIT sources only).
manufacturer	string	Manufacturer name in Japanese, e.g. トヨタ, ホンダ, 日産, スズキ, いすゞ (MLIT only).
modelName	string	Japanese type designation (型式), e.g. 3BA-GRJ150W (MLIT only).
recallType	string	1 recall, 2 improvement measure, 3 service campaign (MLIT only).
consumerCategories	array	Consumer Affairs Agency categories, 1–10. Empty means all.
keyword	string	Japanese free-text search over consumer product recalls, e.g. リチウム, アレルギー, 発火.
requestDelayMs	integer	Minimum pause between requests. Floored at 1000 ms.

{
    "sources": ["automobile"],
    "manufacturer": "トヨタ",
    "notificationDateFrom": "2026-01-01",
    "maxItems": 200
}

Output

Every record uses the same shape regardless of source, so vehicle and food recalls can sit in one table.

{
    "recallId": "mlit:recalldatacar:1158390",
    "source": "mlit",
    "sourceAgency": "Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), Japan",
    "sourceUrl": "https://renrakuda.mlit.go.jp/renrakuda/ris-detail-car.html?selCarTp=1&id=3010497",
    "productDomain": "automobile",
    "category": "Motor vehicle",
    "recallType": "Recall",
    "notificationNumber": "リ 国-5839-0",
    "notificationDate": "2026-06-30",
    "company": "いすゞ",
    "productName": "ギガ",
    "manufacturers": ["いすゞ"],
    "models": ["2PG-CYJ77CA", "2PG-CYJ77DA"],
    "tradeNames": ["ギガ"],
    "chassisNumberRanges": [
        { "model": "2PG-CYJ77CA", "from": "CYJ77C-7017898", "to": "CYJ77C-7026631" }
    ],
    "affectedUnits": 200,
    "productionPeriodFrom": "2021-09-02",
    "productionPeriodTo": "2025-11-13",
    "defectiveComponentJa": "その他(車枠車体)",
    "defectDescriptionJa": "スワップボディコンテナキャリアにおいて、突入防止装置の設計が不適切なため…",
    "remedyDescriptionJa": "全車両、バンパースペーサを変更…",
    "documentUrl": "https://renrakuda.mlit.go.jp/renrakuda/recallpdf/1158390.pdf",
    "attribution": "出典：国土交通省ウェブサイト (https://renrakuda.mlit.go.jp/renrakuda/recall-search.html)",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-08-14T09:13:32.342Z"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data fields

Field	Description
recallId	Stable unique identifier, prefixed by source.
source, sourceAgency, sourceUrl	Which register the record came from and the official page for it.
productDomain, category	automobile / child_seat / tire / consumer_product, plus an English category label.
recallType	Recall, Improvement measure, Service campaign (MLIT) or Voluntary recall / remedy (CAA).
notificationNumber	Formatted exactly as the official register displays it.
notificationDate, publishedDate, actionStartDate	ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
company, productName, title	Filing company and product.
manufacturers, tradeNames, models	Vehicle maker, trade name and type designation (型式).
chassisNumberRanges	Affected chassis / serial number ranges, per model.
affectedUnits	Number of units covered by the notification.
productionPeriodFrom, productionPeriodTo	Manufacture or import period of affected units.
defectiveComponentJa, defectDescriptionJa, remedyDescriptionJa	Component, defect and remedy, verbatim in Japanese.
targetProductDetailsJa, contactJa, remarksJa	Lot/JAN identification, contact details and notes (CAA).
documentUrl	Original notification PDF (MLIT).
referenceUrl	Cross-reference to the publishing ministry (CAA).
imageUrls	Product photo URLs on the official site. Images are linked, never re-hosted.
attribution, disclaimer	Required source attribution and a reminder to verify against the primary source.

A note on language

Structural fields — categories, recall types, dates, counts, model codes — are normalised to English and ISO formats. Free-text fields are kept verbatim in Japanese and are suffixed Ja. Nothing is machine-translated, because a mistranslated defect description in a safety dataset is worse than no translation. Pipe the Ja fields through your own translation step if you need English prose.

How much does it cost to monitor Japanese recalls?

Cost scales with Maximum results, not with runtime. Vehicle recalls are read from a JSON API in batches of 50, so they are extremely cheap to collect; consumer product recalls need one request per record and are the slower of the two.

As a reference point from real runs: 63 consumer product recalls took about 95 seconds, and 6 vehicle recalls took about 8 seconds. A daily "what's new in the last 7 days" run typically returns well under 50 records.

The Apify free tier is enough to try the Actor and to run a small daily monitor.

Tips

• For daily monitoring, set notificationDateFrom to a rolling recent date and keep maxItems low. You get new filings without re-paying for history.
• To screen a fleet or inventory, filter by manufacturer and match your chassis numbers against chassisNumberRanges.
• For food safety, select only consumerProducts with consumerCategories: ["1"] and a keyword such as アレルギー.
• Vehicle recalls are the cheapest source per record — one request returns 50 notifications, so a broad historical pull of the entire MLIT register is practical.
• A proxy is available in Advanced settings but is normally unnecessary: these are public government sites with no anti-bot protection.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? Two official Japanese government registers: the MLIT recall notification database (via its public JSON endpoint) and the Consumer Affairs Agency recall information site. Both are public, require no login, and place no crawling restriction in their robots.txt.

Is this legal? The Actor reads publicly published government data only. MLIT content is provided under the Japanese Public Data License, which permits commercial reuse with attribution; the required attribution string is included in every record. No personal data is collected — filings are made by companies, and the Actor does not gather names or private contact details of individuals. Product photographs remain on the government site and are only linked, never copied.

How current is the data? It reads the registers live at run time, so records are as current as the source. Japanese agencies typically publish within days of a filing.

Is the Japanese text translated? No. See "A note on language" above.

How fast is it? Deliberately capped at one request per second so the government servers are never put under load. This is a floor, not a setting you can lower.

Something broke or you need another Japanese dataset? Open the Issues tab on this Actor. Government sites do change structure occasionally, and issues reported there get fixed. Custom variants — other Japanese registers, other output shapes — can be built on request.

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Disclaimer: this Actor reproduces official recall notifications for information purposes. Always confirm the current status of a recall with the manufacturer or the source page before acting on it. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Government of Japan.