Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Directory Scraper

Scrape Japanese attorney profiles from the Japan Federation of Bar Associations unified Himawari Search directory. Returns ~4,500 registered lawyers across all 52 regional bengoshikai, with names in kanji and kana, registration numbers, office contact details, practice areas, and education — all the fields a cross-border legal recruiter actually needs.

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Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper Features

• Covers every regional bar association in Japan — 52 bengoshikai from Sapporo to Okinawa, plus the three Tokyo associations
• Extracts 30+ fields per profile including both kanji and hiragana name readings
• Decodes the site's JavaScript-obfuscated email addresses automatically
• Splits the ideographic-space-separated practice-area strings into clean arrays
• Filters by barAssociationCodes when you only care about certain regions
• Pure HTML scraping — no browser, no proxies, no Cloudflare drama
• Seeds from the site's own sitemap, so no pagination or search-form wrangling

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Who Uses Japanese Lawyer Directory Data?

• International law firms — Identify local counsel for Japanese matters. Cross-border M&A, IP litigation, and corporate work all need a warm lead at a Japanese firm.
• Legal recruiters — Build candidate pipelines. Registration year, training class, and focus practice areas are all on each profile, which saves a lot of LinkedIn archaeology.
• CRM enrichment — Hydrate account records for Japan-based legal buyers with firm names, office addresses, and direct phone numbers.
• Academic research — Map the structure of the Japanese legal profession by region, practice area, or training cohort.
• Compliance & due diligence — Verify counsel credentials against the JFBA directory. The registration number is the canonical attorney identifier in Japan.

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How the Japan Bengoshikai Scraper Works

1. Fetches the JFBA sitemap at bengoshikai.jp/search/sitemap.php to enumerate every opted-in attorney across all 52 regional bar associations.
2. Optionally filters the URL list by barAssociationCodes so a Tokyo-only run only pulls Tokyo records.
3. Caps the queue at maxItems and crawls each detail page with a conservative concurrency of 5, which is more polite than the site demands.
4. Extracts the structured table fields declaratively, decodes the obfuscated email script, splits practice areas, and writes one clean record per lawyer to the dataset.

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Input

{
  "maxItems": 50,
  "barAssociationCodes": []
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	50	Maximum number of lawyer profiles to scrape. Set to 0 for the full ~4,500-record crawl.
barAssociationCodes	array of int	[]	Optional filter by kai_code. 1 = Tokyo, 2 = Dai-Ni Tokyo, 3 = Dai-Ichi Tokyo, 4 = Kanagawa, 5 = Saitama, 6 = Chiba, 14 = Osaka, 15 = Kyoto, 16 = Hyōgo, 20 = Aichi, 31 = Fukuoka, 38 = Okinawa, 45 = Sapporo.

Tokyo-only run

{
  "maxItems": 200,
  "barAssociationCodes": [1, 2, 3]
}

The three Tokyo bar associations (東京, 第一東京, 第二東京) share the same geography but register separately. Passing all three catches every Tokyo attorney in one sweep.

Full national crawl

{
  "maxItems": 0,
  "barAssociationCodes": []
}

Pulls every lawyer the site has (~4,500). Runs in a few minutes on 256 MB.

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Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper Output Fields

{
  "name_kanji": "鈴木 正貢",
  "name_kana": "すずき まさつぐ",
  "registration_number": "10064",
  "qualification_type": "弁護士",
  "bar_association_code": 1,
  "bar_association_name": "東京",
  "office_name": "ベーカー＆マッケンジー法律事務所外国法共同事業",
  "office_address": "東京都港区六本木1-9-10 アークヒルズ仙石山森タワー28階",
  "office_postal_code": "106-0032",
  "office_phone": "03-6271-9900",
  "office_fax": "03-5549-7720",
  "email": "masatsugu.suzuki@bakernet.com",
  "homepage_url": "http://www.taalo-bakernet.com/",
  "origin_qualification_country": "",
  "registration_year": "1966年",
  "training_class": "18期",
  "birth_year": "1937年",
  "gender": "男性",
  "hometown": "山形県　山形市",
  "education": "昭和34年中央大学法学部法律学科卒業、昭和47年ノースウエスタン大学法科大学大学院修士課程卒業法学修士",
  "non_bar_qualifications": "弁理士",
  "foreign_languages": "英語",
  "business_hours": "10:00 - 18:00",
  "practice_areas": ["Ｍ＆Ａ・企業再編", "独占禁止法", "国際的商取引", "外国法関連"],
  "focus_practice_areas": ["Ｍ＆Ａ・企業再編", "独占禁止法", "国際的商取引"],
  "teaching_history": "平成８年～現在　横浜国立大学大学院非常勤講師",
  "other_career": "東弁－平成2年～現在まで独占禁止法部部長",
  "publications": "「国際取引の法務戦略」中央経済社",
  "last_updated_date": "2007.12.14",
  "portrait_url": "https://www.bengoshikai.jp/files/portrait/10064.jpg",
  "profile_url": "https://www.bengoshikai.jp/search/detail.php?kai_code=1&id=10064",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-23T13:08:00.465Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
name_kanji	string	Full name in kanji.
name_kana	string	Name in hiragana reading. Useful for alphabetical sorting.
registration_number	string	JFBA registration number. Unique attorney identifier nationwide.
qualification_type	string	弁護士 (attorney) or 外国法事務弁護士 (foreign-law attorney).
bar_association_code	integer	Numeric kai_code (1–52) for the regional bengoshikai.
bar_association_name	string	Bar association name in kanji (e.g. 東京, 大阪, 札幌弁護士会).
office_name	string	Name of the law office / firm.
office_address	string	Office street address, without the postal code.
office_postal_code	string	Japanese postal code in nnn-nnnn format.
office_phone	string	Office phone number.
office_fax	string	Office fax number.
email	string	Direct email, decoded from the site's JS-obfuscated mailto link.
homepage_url	string	Law office homepage URL.
origin_qualification_country	string	Country of original qualification, populated only for foreign-law attorneys.
registration_year	string	Year of bar registration (e.g. 1966年).
training_class	string	JLRTC training class / 修習期 (e.g. 18期).
birth_year	string	Year of birth.
gender	string	男性 or 女性.
hometown	string	Place of origin.
education	string	Academic and law school history.
non_bar_qualifications	string	Other qualifications (patent attorney, tax accountant, etc.).
foreign_languages	string	Languages spoken beyond Japanese.
business_hours	string	Office hours as self-reported.
practice_areas	array of string	General practice areas (取扱業務), split into clean items.
focus_practice_areas	array of string	Self-declared focus areas (重点取扱業務).
teaching_history	string	Academic teaching positions.
other_career	string	Bar committee roles, prior career notes.
publications	string	Authored books and articles.
last_updated_date	string	When the attorney last updated the profile. Some records go back to 2007.
portrait_url	string	Fully-qualified URL to the attorney's photo, if registered.
profile_url	string	Canonical detail page URL on bengoshikai.jp.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of the scrape.

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FAQ

How do I scrape Japanese lawyer data?

Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper pulls attorney profiles from the JFBA unified directory at bengoshikai.jp. Run it with maxItems: 0 to grab every opted-in lawyer across all 52 bar associations, or pass specific barAssociationCodes if you only need Tokyo, Osaka, or a particular region.

What data can I get from bengoshikai.jp?

Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper returns 30+ structured fields per attorney including kanji and kana names, bar registration numbers, office addresses with postal codes, phone and fax, decoded email addresses, practice areas split into arrays, education, training class, and a whole stack of biographical fields the site exposes.

How much does Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper cost?

Pay per event: $0.10 per actor start plus $0.001 per record. A full national crawl of ~4,500 profiles runs about $4.60. A Tokyo-only pull of 700 attorneys is closer to $0.80.

Does the scraper need proxies?

No. The JFBA site serves from a basic Japanese web host with no Cloudflare, no rate limiter, no bot challenges. The scraper runs directly at a concurrency of 5 and finishes the full dataset in a few minutes.

Can I filter by bar association?

Yes. Pass barAssociationCodes as an array of kai_code integers. Common picks: [1] for the main Tokyo Bar, [1, 2, 3] for all three Tokyo associations combined, [14] for Osaka, [20] for Aichi / Nagoya, [31] for Fukuoka, [45] for Sapporo.

Why are some profiles missing fields?

Himawari Search registration is voluntary and each attorney fills in their own record. Fields like email, homepage_url, foreign_languages, business_hours, and portrait_url are only populated when the lawyer chose to share them. registration_number, name_kanji, name_kana, bar_association_name, and office_address are present on essentially every record.

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Need More Features?

Need extra fields, a different filter, or a companion scraper for another Japanese legal directory? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use Japan Bengoshikai Lawyer Scraper?

• Only Japanese lawyer scraper on the Apify store — Everyone else covers the US and UK. This one covers the world's third-largest legal market.
• Clean output — Names are split into kanji and kana, practice areas are arrays not delimited blobs, postal codes are normalized, and email addresses are decoded from the site's JavaScript obfuscation without you touching any of it.
• Cheap — $0.001 per record. A full 4,500-profile national crawl costs less than a cup of coffee.