@pipeworx/japan-corporate-number

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/japan-corporate-number’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 2

Japan’s National Tax Agency (国税庁) corporate-number register (法人番号公表サイト) — the complete spine of every 13-digit 法人番号 issued since 2015-10-05: legal name, katakana reading and English name when NTA holds one, address, corporate kind (stock company, LLC, government body, NPO, etc.) and status (active, or closed/merged with the narrative NTA published). 5,837,980 entities as of the 2026-09-30 cut.

gBizINFO (mcps/gbizinfo, METI) is a different source hanging richer government records — procurement, subsidies, patents, financials — off the same corporate number, with partial coverage. This pack is the complete spine (every registered number, from NTA directly); use gbizinfo for the government-record detail once you have a number.

Tools

• jp_corporate_number(number) — look up one entity by its 13-digit 法人番号. Validates the check digit before looking up (see “Check digit” below) and returns found: false with a reason for a malformed number, a check-digit failure, or a correctly-formed number simply not in the register — never an empty object.
• jp_company_search(name, prefecture?, limit?) — search by Japanese name (substring, corporate-suffix-insensitive) or, for the subset of entities NTA published one for, an English name/katakana reading. prefecture accepts a Japanese name, an English name, or a 2-digit code.

Auth

Keyless. The gateway supplies the data directly — no caller-facing key, and no vendor key of any kind (the register is published as a monthly file, not a live API). The tools work only through the hosted gateway: a standalone build has no data to read and returns a loud error (StoreUnavailableError) naming that, never an empty result.

Data source & reuse terms

• Japan National Tax Agency (国税庁), Corporate Number Publication Site (法人番号公表サイト) — the whole-country corporate-number register, published monthly. Pipeworx loads each monthly edition; data_as_of on every response is when the loaded edition was taken.
• Terms of use (Japan’s Public Data License v1.0, quoted from NTA’s terms-of-use page): attribution is required (“本コンテンツを利用する際は出典を記載してください” — when using this content, state the source); edits/derivative processing must be disclosed separately from the attribution; and edited/processed data must never be presented as though the government itself produced it (“編集・加工等した情報を、あたかも国（又は府省等）が作成したかのような 態様で公表・利用することは禁止します”). Otherwise permissive — commercial reuse and redistribution are not restricted. This README and every tool response carry the source and data_as_of; the data is NTA’s, reformatted by Pipeworx, never presented as government-produced.

Kind codes (法人種別)

The complete set observed: 101 national government organization, 201 local government, 301 Kabushiki Kaisha (stock company), 302 Godo Kaisha (LLC-equivalent), 303 Gomei Kaisha, 304 Goshi Kaisha, 305 other registered corporation (e.g. incorporated association/foundation), 399 other, 499 foreign company etc. Labels are best-effort English glosses of NTA’s standard code table; the raw code is always returned alongside the label.

Status — a real correctness trap

A corporation closed by merger (process_type 71/72, ~31,000 entities) carries closure_event_text (a Japanese sentence naming the surviving company) but closure_date and closure_cause_code are NULL for these rows — that pair is populated by a different closure mechanism entirely (mostly process_type 21, ~784K rows), which mostly has no closure_event_text. Checking closure_date alone misses every merged-away entity. status is closed_or_merged when any of closure_date, closure_event_text, or process_type ∈ {71, 72} is present.

Check digit

A 法人番号’s first digit is a check digit over the other 12 (most significant first), weighted 2,1,2,1,... (the most significant base digit carries weight 2), summed, mod 9, check = 9 - (sum mod 9). Verified against real numbers from the register (1000012160153, 1000013050386, 1000013050394 all pass; the naive “textbook” weighting 1,2,1,2,... fails all three). jp_corporate_number validates this before looking up, so a malformed or impossible number gets a specific bad_format / bad_check_digit reason rather than a bare “not found”.

”Japanese and romanised matching” — what this is and is not

jp_company_search matches a single FTS5 trigram index over the Japanese core name (corporate-suffix stripped, e.g. “株式会社” / “K.K.” both fold away), the English name, and the katakana reading — whichever of these NTA actually published for that entity. It is not a transliterator: a company with no registered English name/kana will not be found by a romanised query that NTA never recorded. prefecture is resolved against a static 47-prefecture table (src/prefectures.ts) so it works by Japanese name, English name, or code regardless of whether the matched company registered an English address — filtering on the register’s own per-company prefecture_en column directly would silently miss almost every entity in a prefecture whose companies have no English name at all.

FTS5’s trigram tokenizer windows by character, not byte: a query under 3 characters produces no trigrams and matches nothing via MATCH even when it is a real substring (verified: a 2-character Japanese query returns 0 rows via FTS, 5+ via LIKE, for an identical string). jp_company_search falls back to a plain substring scan for any query under 3 characters.

Tools

• jp_corporate_number — Look up a Japanese company/organization by its 13-digit NTA corporate number.
• jp_company_search — Search Japan’s NTA corporate-number register by Japanese or romanised company name.