Japan Courts (裁判所) Judgment Scraper

Scrape Japanese court judgments from courts.go.jp, the official case database maintained by the Supreme Court of Japan. Returns case metadata, ruling dates in both wareki (令和/平成/昭和) and Gregorian formats, court names, ruling types, results, and direct PDF links for Supreme Court, lower court, IP High Court, administrative, and labor opinions.

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Japan Courts Scraper Features

• Extracts 18 fields per judgment — case number, case name, ruling date, court name, ruling type, result, subcategory, and more.
• Converts wareki dates (令和8年4月7日) to Gregorian ISO format (2026-04-07). The code knows 明治 through 令和, so anything post-Meiji-Restoration parses correctly.
• Covers six verticals in one actor: Supreme Court (最高裁判例), recent Supreme Court cases, lower courts (下級裁裁判例), administrative cases (行政事件), labor cases (労働事件), and Intellectual Property High Court (知的財産裁判例).
• Returns direct PDF URLs for every judgment. Download and OCR the full opinion text yourself, or feed the URLs straight into a legal-research pipeline.
• Optional detail-page fetch adds 判示事項 (issue summary) and 参照法条 (referenced laws) to each record.
• Filters by keyword (事件名), exact case number (事件番号), ruling date range, and specific court name.
• No proxies, no rate-limit workarounds, no CAPTCHA solving — courts.go.jp serves clean HTML to anyone who asks.

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Who Uses Japan Court Data?

• Legal tech startups building Japan-market products — feed structured case law into LegalOn, Holmes, MNTSQ-style AI assistants.
• Cross-border M&A and IP firms — track IP High Court rulings, patent disputes, and administrative appeals without a Westlaw Japan subscription.
• Academic researchers — build longitudinal datasets of Japanese Supreme Court decisions, which is harder than it sounds with paid databases.
• Compliance and sanctions teams — monitor labor and administrative rulings that affect multinational operations in Japan.
• LLM training pipelines — ingest the full corpus of Japanese legal reasoning for domain-specific model fine-tuning.
• Journalists covering Japanese legal affairs — quick lookup of rulings by keyword or date range, without paying per-query fees to commercial databases.

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How Japan Courts Scraper Works

1. Pick a case category — Supreme Court, lower courts, IP High Court, administrative, or labor. You can also choose "recent Supreme Court" for the curated recent-decisions list.
2. Optionally add filters: case name keyword, exact case number, ruling date range, or specific court. Leave them empty to walk the full recent-cases index for that vertical.
3. The scraper paginates through results 30 rows at a time, parses each row into a structured record, and stops when maxItems is reached.
4. Enable includeDetail to fetch each judgment's detail page for the summary (判示事項) and referenced laws (参照法条). Roughly doubles the run time but returns richer records.

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Input

{
  "searchType": "supreme",
  "caseNameKeyword": "",
  "caseNumber": "",
  "rulingDateFrom": "",
  "rulingDateTo": "",
  "courtName": "",
  "includeDetail": false,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchType	string	"supreme"	One of supreme, recent_supreme, lower, admin, labor, ip.
caseNameKeyword	string	""	Keyword search on 事件名 (case name). Japanese or romanized.
caseNumber	string	""	Exact case number match (e.g. 令和7(行ヒ)25).
rulingDateFrom	string	""	Lower bound of ruling date range, Gregorian YYYY-MM-DD.
rulingDateTo	string	""	Upper bound of ruling date range, Gregorian YYYY-MM-DD.
courtName	string	""	Filter by specific court name (e.g. 最高裁判所, 東京高等裁判所).
includeDetail	boolean	false	When true, fetches each detail page for summary and law references.
maxItems	integer	50	Cap on records returned. Set 0 for unlimited (watch the actor timeout).

Examples

Recent IP High Court decisions with full detail:

{ "searchType": "ip", "includeDetail": true, "maxItems": 25 }

Supreme Court rulings from 2024:

{
  "searchType": "supreme",
  "rulingDateFrom": "2024-01-01",
  "rulingDateTo": "2024-12-31",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Keyword search for constitutional cases:

{ "searchType": "supreme", "caseNameKeyword": "憲法", "maxItems": 50 }

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Japan Courts Scraper Output Fields

{
  "hanrei_id": "95816",
  "case_number": "令和6(あ)1479",
  "case_name": "各廃棄物の処理及び清掃に関する法律違反被告事件",
  "ruling_date": "2026-04-07",
  "ruling_date_wareki": "令和8年4月7日",
  "court_name": "最高裁判所第三小法廷",
  "court_branch": null,
  "ruling_type": "決定",
  "result": "棄却",
  "original_court": "東京高等裁判所",
  "original_case_number": "令和5(う)1193",
  "category": "supreme",
  "subcategory": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://www.courts.go.jp/assets/hanrei/hanrei-pdf-95816.pdf",
  "detail_url": "https://www.courts.go.jp/hanrei/95816/detail2/index.html",
  "summary_jp": "１　破産手続開始の決定を受けた株式会社を被告人とする刑事事件が係属している場合における破産手続の終了と刑訴法３３９条１項４号にいう…",
  "law_references": null,
  "source_url": "https://www.courts.go.jp/hanrei/search1/index.html?filter%5Brecent%5D=true&offset=0",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-23T07:46:31.873Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
hanrei_id	string	Internal document ID on courts.go.jp.
case_number	string	Case number / 事件番号 in wareki format.
case_name	string	Case name / 事件名 in Japanese.
ruling_date	string	Ruling date in Gregorian YYYY-MM-DD.
ruling_date_wareki	string	Ruling date in original wareki format (令和/平成/昭和).
court_name	string	Court name including panel (e.g. 最高裁判所第三小法廷).
court_branch	string	Court branch or section when distinct from court_name.
ruling_type	string	判決 (hanketsu/judgment) or 決定 (kettei/decision).
result	string	Ruling result (破棄自判 / 棄却 / 却下 / 認容 / etc.).
original_court	string	Lower court for appellate cases (原審裁判所).
original_case_number	string	Lower court case number (原審事件番号).
category	string	supreme, recent_supreme, lower, ip, admin, or labor.
subcategory	string	Tag set such as 特許権, 民事訴訟 when present.
pdf_url	string	Direct URL to the full-text judgment PDF.
detail_url	string	URL of the judgment detail page on courts.go.jp.
summary_jp	string	判示事項 / 裁判要旨 when available (requires includeDetail).
law_references	string	参照法条 referenced laws (requires includeDetail).
source_url	string	The listing-page URL this record came from.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 timestamp when the record was extracted.

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FAQ

How do I scrape courts.go.jp?

Japan Courts Scraper pulls judgments from the official /hanrei/search{N}/index.html endpoints. Pick a searchType, add optional filters, and set maxItems — that's the whole setup. No login, no proxy.

How much does Japan Courts Scraper cost to run?

Japan Courts Scraper uses pay-per-event pricing at $0.10 per run start plus $0.001 per record. A 500-record run costs around $0.60 total. IP High Court and labor verticals usually return smaller batches; Supreme Court has ~67,000 cases available if you want the full archive.

What data can I get from courts.go.jp?

Japan Courts Scraper returns 18 fields per judgment, including case number, case name, ruling date (wareki and Gregorian), court name and panel, ruling type, result, the PDF URL, and — optionally — the full summary text and referenced laws from the detail page.

Does Japan Courts Scraper need proxies?

Japan Courts Scraper does not need proxies. The target is a Japanese government site that serves clean HTML to any standard user agent, which is more than most scrapers can claim.

Can I filter by court or date range?

Japan Courts Scraper accepts courtName, rulingDateFrom, and rulingDateTo filters. The court name filter matches substrings like 最高裁判所 or 東京高等裁判所. Dates are Gregorian — the actor handles the wareki conversion on the output side, not the input side.

How do I get the full opinion text?

Japan Courts Scraper returns a direct pdf_url for each judgment. Download the PDF with whatever pipeline you already use for legal research. The actor deliberately does not inline the PDF text — OCR and legal-parsing workflows vary too much to be one-size-fits-all.

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Need More Features?

Need custom fields, different filters, or a different target site? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use Japan Courts Scraper?

• Only actor targeting saibansho — zero competition on Apify, covers all six courts.go.jp verticals in one place.
• Structured wareki + Gregorian dates — parses 令和/平成/昭和/大正/明治 eras to ISO format so you can sort, filter, and join on dates without writing your own era converter.
• Clean output, no proxies — returns structured JSON with consistent field names, and runs on a direct HTTP crawler with no browser overhead, so it's fast and cheap.