Company Name — Verification and Formatting

A company name in Japan needs to be checked for uniqueness and for conflicts with existing trademarks, must not mislead anyone about the type of company, and its Latin-alphabet transliteration needs to be handled correctly for later SWIFT transfers and for services like Wise. The director's name is always written in katakana on the seal and in the registration. Details of each of these aspects follow below. Uniqueness of a company name, including similar-sounding existing entities, can be checked at houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp — only the Japanese version of the site works properly; the English version is stripped down and cannot search by katakana reading. Identical names are in principle allowed between sole proprietorships; for corporations, names cannot overlap within the same 区分 (classification code). Trademark searches are done at j-platpat.inpit.go.jp (商標検索; the code for IT is 42). It is possible for two companies to share an identical reading of their name (kanji versus katakana) and for identical names to exist under different entity types (有限会社 versus 株式会社), especially if one of the companies has since closed or is a subsidiary. Legally, a company name must not mislead as to the type of company (Companies Act Article 6(3)), yet oddities such as "Kabushiki-Kaisha Kabushiki-Kaisha" have actually turned up in the NTA registry. Kanji such as 株式会社 do not survive international SWIFT transfers, since the protocol only supports the Latin alphabet. Recommended practice is to register the company with its legal-type suffix already in Latin script: "Kabushiki Kaisha" written out in full without a hyphen (hyphens in the beneficiary name can be stripped by intermediary banks such as JPMorgan Chase), or the abbreviation "KK" — avoid English adaptations like Ltd. or Inc. The official Ministry of Justice database spelling is "Kabushiki-kaisha" (lowercase second word, hyphenated). Banks sometimes strip extra spaces from account details, which can cause confusion. In Wise, the "Registered Business Name" field must contain ONLY the company-name portion, without "株式会社"/the legal-form suffix (that goes in a separate field) — a common mistake is typing the kanji 株式会社 straight into the name field, which then blocks SWIFT because the Account Holder Name contains non-Latin characters. Wise's "Trading Business Name" field has no effect on SWIFT and is only used for the name shown to clients on invoices. A company representative's (director's) name is always written in katakana on the seal and in the registration, never in Latin script — Latin script is allowed only for the company name itself (example: Apple Japan合同会社). The katakana transliteration of a name can differ between banks and institutions — it is worth standardizing it as early as possible to avoid integration problems when linking services to a bank account. Source: https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/ — National Tax Agency registry of corporate numbers and company names. Source: https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp — Official Japanese patent and trademark search database.