Company Seals: Sets, Types, and the Electronic Registration Scan Requirement

A set of 3 wooden seals for a KK — a representative seal (18 mm), a bank seal (16.5/18 mm), and a square seal (21/24 mm) — costs from about 4,500 yen (via freee, from around 5,000 yen in 2022 and about 19,000 yen through freee's outsourced service in 2025); on Rakuten (the Hankomaturi shop) individual seals go from about 3,500–5,600 yen. A company seal can realistically be made for around 10,000 yen despite inflated AI-generated estimates of 200,000–400,000 yen. The wording differs by entity type: a KK seal shows the position (director), while a GK seal shows just the name and can be used by any of its members. A KK representative seal reads 代表取締役 (6 kanji plus a suffix), while a GK representative seal reads 代表社員 (4 kanji) or 代表社員職務執行者 (9 kanji) — the term 取締役 must not appear on a GK seal. Types of seals used in Japan include 捨印 (sutein, for corrections/cancellations), 実印 (jitsuin, a personal seal registered with the ward office), and お届印/銀行印 (todokein/ginkoin, for bank documents). A company's main seal is often generically called 丸印 (maruin, "round seal") or 代表者印/会社実印. Registering the company seal is mandatory to obtain a cash card at some banks, for example SMBC Trunk. A technical wrinkle of electronic seal registration is that the scanned seal-registration form must be at least 400 dpi; convenience-store scanners (7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart) usually max out at 300 dpi, but a Ministop scanner was found that met the requirement. If the seal is not registered electronically at filing time, the applicant must go to the Ministry of Justice in person. Separately, an address stamp for the company (for envelopes, documents, and bank registration) is an inexpensive, useful, customizable accessory available on Amazon — worth ordering early so the address does not have to be written by hand, especially for 信用金庫 (shinkin) banks.