Articles of Incorporation (定款/teikan) — Overview

The teikan (定款) is the key document defining a company's permitted business activities; it must match the actual business and comply with the Companies Act (会社法). It can be generated for free through freee, using sample wording drawn from teikan.tokyo. A KK's articles must be notarized; GK has no such requirement. After registration, the articles can be amended by a shareholders' resolution without renewed notarization. The articles can be generated for free through the freee service and test-run with a dummy name before the real filing. Sample wording for 事業目的 (business purpose clauses), collected from the articles of public companies and companies that went through an IPO, is available at teikan.tokyo (teikan.tokyo/teikan/index.php). It is not advisable to list dozens of business activities at once — banks can grow wary ("they don't even know what they do" reads as an unserious company), which may affect a bank account application (a chat opinion echoed by several participants, though not fully confirmed). See: Company Seals for KK/GK. A notary for notarizing a KK's articles can be chosen freely from the list at koshonin.gr.jp/list (for example, four notaries are listed for Kyoto). The notary fee has ranged from free in one case to roughly 16,000–53,000 yen depending on the case (figures in the chat vary). It is worth ordering two or more certified copies of the articles up front — they may be needed later, for example to get a bank loan. The result is delivered as a CD copy of the document. After registration, the teikan itself is not reissued: amendments are made by a shareholders'/board resolution (like amendments to a constitution), and the company keeps the final version itself. No renewed notarization is required — only a registration fee is paid for the parts that must be officially declared. Most types of amendment cost around 30,000 yen: relocating between cities costs roughly twice as much (about 30,000–50,000 yen), and changing the listed business activities also costs about 30,000–50,000 yen by various chat estimates; a capital change is calculated by a separate formula. A lawyer's threshold for amending the articles to fit a specific investment (for example, different share classes) is around 30,000 yen — the more standard the original articles, the cheaper the amendment. Source: https://teikan.tokyo/teikan/index.php — Collection of sample business-purpose (事業目的) wording drawn from Japanese companies' articles, including IPO companies. Source: https://www.freee.co.jp/lp/launch/ — freee service for generating articles of incorporation and preparing company registration documents. Source: https://www.koshonin.gr.jp/list — Official directory of notary offices in Japan for notarizing articles of incorporation.