Japan Laws & Regulations (e-Gov Official)

Full text of Japanese laws as structured JSON, with optional English reference translations. This Actor reads the official e-Gov Laws API v2 (e-Gov法令検索・デジタル庁) and returns one JSON item per article (条) — articles, paragraphs (項) and items (号) as a clean tree plus flat text — for any law you pick by title, number, or ID, at any point in time (as_of_date). Official API based — no scraping.

An honest note first: for laws already covered by the Ministry of Justice's official Japanese Law Translation Database (JLT), use JLT — those translations are curated. This Actor's value is the gap JLT does not cover: laws not yet in JLT, the latest amendments, point-in-time versions, and machine-readable structure for pipelines and AI agents. Translations here are machine-generated reference translations with no legal effect. Tested against frozen datasets on every release.

What you get

One JSON item per article — real output for the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (個人情報保護法):

{
  "record_type": "article",
  "law_id": "415AC0000000057",
  "law_num": "平成十五年法律第五十七号",
  "law_title_ja": "個人情報の保護に関する法律",
  "law_abbrev_ja": "個人情報保護法",
  "title_en": null,
  "promulgation_date": "2003-05-30",
  "enforcement_date": "2026-06-24",
  "law_revision_id": "415AC0000000057_20260624_508AC0000000046",
  "as_of": null,
  "article_number": "1",
  "article_display_ja": "第一条",
  "article_caption_ja": "（目的）",
  "paragraphs": [
    { "paragraph_number": "1", "text_ja": "この法律は、デジタル社会の進展に伴い…", "items": [] }
  ],
  "text_ja": "（目的）\n第一条\nこの法律は、デジタル社会の進展に伴い…",
  "source": "laws",
  "source_url": "https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/api/2/law_data/415AC0000000057?response_format=json",
  "retrieved_at": "2026-07-10T00:00:00+09:00",
  "attribution": "出典：e-Gov法令検索（デジタル庁）",
  "schema_version": "0.1.0"
}

With translate: true, each item also carries a translated block: a faithful English translation_en (numbers preserved and cross-checked against the source — mismatches are flagged, never silently kept), a one-sentence summary_en, the law-level law_title_en, and the disclaimer. All generated fields carry confidence and method: "llm".

How to use

1. Set law_query: a law title (個人情報の保護に関する法律), a common abbreviation, a law number (平成十五年法律第五十七号), or an e-Gov law ID (415AC0000000057). One law per run — the prefilled example returns the first five articles in seconds.
2. Optionally narrow with articles (e.g. ["1", "2-2", "第二十三条"]) or pin a historical version with as_of_date.
3. Optionally set translate: true for English reference translations.
4. Read the results from the default dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

What this does NOT do

• No bulk corpus. Retrieving all laws sequentially is prohibited by the API provider, and this Actor is built so it cannot do that (one law per run, law_query required). For corpus needs, use the official bulk XML download.
• Translations are unofficial. This is an unofficial reference translation generated by machine. It has no legal effect and does not constitute legal advice. For official translations, see the Japanese Law Translation Database (JLT) by the Ministry of Justice.
• title_en is null in the basic output — the upstream API provides no English titles, and this Actor does not guess. (With translate: true, an LLM-generated title rendering is included in the translated block, clearly labeled.)
• Main provision (本則) only in v1: supplementary provisions (附則), appended tables and figures are not extracted as articles.
• Numbers in translations are cross-checked for presence against the kanji-normalized source; mismatches set verification_failed: true on the field (values are kept so you can inspect them).
• The upstream API may change or suspend service without notice; we monitor with frozen-dataset regression tests.

Pricing

Pay-per-event, fully transparent:

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.02
Article (basic)	$0.004
Translated article	$0.029 (LLM output)

Free allowance: the first 20 articles of every run are free (basic records; translated articles are always billed). Per-run limit: 200 articles. If your run hits the maximum charge limit you set, the Actor stops gracefully and keeps the partial results.

Data source & attribution

Law texts come from the e-Gov Laws API operated by Japan's Digital Agency: 出典：e-Gov法令検索（デジタル庁）. Japanese law texts themselves are not subject to copyright (Copyright Act art. 13); the structure and translations are produced by this Actor, which is independent and not endorsed by the Digital Agency or the Ministry of Justice.

More Japan data Actors

This Actor is part of a family of official-API-based Japan data Actors. See also Japan Company Filings (EDINET Official), Japan Subsidies & Grants Data (Official), Japan Real Estate Transaction Prices (MLIT Official), and Japan Company Data Enrichment (Official Registry). Check the developer profile for the full list.

Contact

Found an issue or need a field the upstream API provides but this Actor doesn't expose yet? Open a ticket on the Issues tab — first response within 48 hours.