Japan Company Data — gBizINFO (Official API v1)

Search Japan's 4.5M+ corporations through the official gBizINFO REST API (JSON) — filter by name, prefecture, business item or corporate type, or look up companies by their 13-digit corporate number. Get corporate number, name, address, capital, employees, establishment date, business items and more, English-keyed, with a legal envelope on every record.

This Actor is a thin, polite client for the official gBizINFO REST API v1 (info.gbiz.go.jp/hojin/v1/hojin) of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (経済産業省 gBizINFO). It is not a scraper — it calls the documented JSON API the way METI intends, using your own gBizINFO API token, and returns each result as a flat record with a legal envelope (source / sourceUrl / license / retrievedAt) on every item.

Unofficial tool. Independently built and maintained. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or gBizINFO. gBizINFO data is provided under the 政府標準利用規約（第2.0版） (Government Standard Terms of Use v2.0), which permits commercial reuse, adaptation and redistribution with attribution; the required 出典 statement 「出典：gBizINFO(経済産業省)」 is embedded in the license of every record.

No personal names. gBizINFO exposes a representative's name and title (代表者氏名・役職). This Actor excludes them by construction — the output projection is a strict allow-list that never reads those fields, and an automated test asserts no representative name reaches the dataset.

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Quick start — verified input

Copy, paste, replace the key, run (verified against mock API fixtures in npm test; a live run needs your own token — see the next section for how to get one in two minutes):

{
  "apiToken": "<your key>",
  "mode": "search",
  "searchWord": "トヨタ",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Get the token at https://info.gbiz.go.jp/hojin/api_registration/form (free; it is e-mailed to you). prefecture is a dropdown of the 47 English prefecture names; via the API you may also pass the Japanese name ("東京都"), the JIS code ("13"), or common romanisations ("osaka-fu", "Ōsaka").

⚠️ You need your own gBizINFO API token

This Actor does not bundle an API key. You must supply your own free gBizINFO API token in the apiToken input.

1. Register and request a token (free): https://info.gbiz.go.jp/hojin/api_registration/form
2. Paste the issued token into this Actor's apiToken field (it is stored as a secret, sent only in the X-hojinInfo-api-token request header, and never written to logs or URLs).

Why this design? By running under your token, every call stays inside your own gBizINFO registration and any access limits apply to you. Compliance with the gBizINFO API terms of use is the responsibility of the token holder — i.e. you.

Source-display obligation (出典表示義務)

gBizINFO data is released under the 政府標準利用規約（第2.0版）, which requires the source to be displayed. This Actor embeds the credit 「出典：gBizINFO(経済産業省)（https://info.gbiz.go.jp/）」 verbatim in the license field of every record. If you display or republish the data, keep that credit visible.

Two modes

1. search — filtered corporate search (GET /v1/hojin)

Give a searchWord (company name / keyword) and/or a prefecture, businessItem, or corporateType, and get back matching corporations. At least one filter is required (this is a targeted search over 4.5M corporations, not a full-database dump). Results are paged automatically up to maxItems.

2. by_corporate_number — look up specific companies (GET /v1/hojin/{number})

Give one or more 13-digit corporate numbers (法人番号) and get one record per company. Numbers not found in gBizINFO are skipped with a log line.

Sample output

{
  "corporateNumber": "5010001000001",
  "companyName": "サンプル商事株式会社",
  "companyNameEn": "Sample Shoji Co., Ltd.",
  "companyNameKana": "サンプルショウジ",
  "location": "東京都千代田区霞が関1-3-1",
  "postalCode": "1000013",
  "prefecture": "東京都",
  "prefectureCode": "13",
  "capitalStockJpy": 50000000,
  "employeeNumber": 120,
  "establishmentDate": "1998-04-01",
  "foundingYear": 1998,
  "businessItems": ["卸売業", "電気機械器具"],
  "businessSummary": "電気機械器具の卸売および輸出入。",
  "corporateType": "301",
  "status": "-",
  "companyUrl": "https://example.co.jp/",
  "lastUpdate": "2026-07-15",
  "profileUrl": "https://info.gbiz.go.jp/hojin/ichiran?hojinBango=5010001000001",
  "source": "gBizINFO REST API（経済産業省）/ gBizINFO REST API, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan",
  "sourceUrl": "https://info.gbiz.go.jp/",
  "license": "出典：gBizINFO(経済産業省)（https://info.gbiz.go.jp/）。政府標準利用規約（第2.0版）… Unofficial … Representative (personal) names are excluded.",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-08-26T09:12:44Z"
}

location is the corporation's registered head-office address — public corporate-registry data. The representative_name / representative_position (a person's name and title) that gBizINFO also returns are not included.

Input example

{
  "apiToken": "<your key>",
  "mode": "search",
  "searchWord": "製作所",
  "prefecture": "Osaka",
  "corporateType": "301",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Common input mistakes

Mistake	Correct
"apiToken": "<your key>" left as is / empty	paste your real gBizINFO token (the run fails immediately with a link to get one)
{"apiToken": "…", "mode": "search"} with no filter	add "searchWord": "トヨタ" (or prefecture / businessItem / corporateType)
{"mode": "search", "corporateNumber": ["5010001000001"]}	"mode": "by_corporate_number" (the Actor switches for you when mode is omitted)
"corporateNumber": "T5010001000001" (invoice-registration number)	drop the T: "5010001000001" — 13 digits
"prefecture": "Osaka-shi" / "Yokohama" (a city)	"prefecture": "Osaka" / "Kanagawa" — prefectures only
"corporateType": "株式会社"	the code: "301"

Empty results?

A run that finds nothing completes with 0 items and a warning in the log (not a failure). Typical causes: an English searchWord (corporate names are indexed in Japanese — try トヨタ instead of Toyota), a prefecture + searchWord pair that do not belong together, a businessItem/corporateType code that no corporation matches, or a corporate number that gBizINFO has no record for (HTTP 404, reported per number). Broaden the search or drop a filter and retry. HTTP 401/403 means the token is wrong or expired — that fails the run visibly.

Pricing

Pay per result — see the pricing tab. A search run returns one record per matching corporation (paged); a by_corporate_number run returns one record per number you supply.

FAQ

Is this official? No. Unofficial, not affiliated with METI. It is a client of gBizINFO's official public API.

Why is apiToken required and not provided? Every call runs under your own gBizINFO token. It is entered as a secret, sent only in the X-hojinInfo-api-token header, and redacted from all logs.

Do you return representative (director) names? No. Representative name and title are excluded by construction, and an automated test verifies they never appear in the output.

How fresh is the data? Live at request time — the same data gBizINFO serves through its API.

Rate limits / server load? One sequential connection, ≥ 1.2 s between requests, exponential backoff on 429/5xx, a hard per-run request budget, and no rate-limit evasion — gBizINFO returns HTTP 429 on short-burst bulk access, so a persistent block fails the run visibly.

Search terms this Actor answers

japan company data api · gbizinfo · japan corporate registry english · japan business database · japan corporate number lookup · 法人番号 api · japan company search api · japanese companies dataset · METI gBizINFO API · japan corporate data enrichment

Note for the Apify automated build test

This Actor requires a valid personal gBizINFO apiToken (secret) to make any live call, so Apify's default automated run test cannot pass unattended (no key). An automated-test exemption is requested for this Actor (same handling as other key-required API Actors, e.g. japan-estat-statistics and japan-yahoo-shopping-api). Functionality is covered by the unit test suite (npm test, 27 tests) over mock API fixtures; a live run needs the buyer's own token.

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Official API: gBizINFO REST API v1 — https://info.gbiz.go.jp/hojin/APIManual . Terms: 政府標準利用規約 v2.0 — commercial use, adaptation and redistribution permitted with attribution (embedded in every record). Credit 「出典：gBizINFO(経済産業省)」 is embedded in every record. Representative (personal) names are excluded. Unofficial; not affiliated with METI.