← NewPacific

Article 67 of Japan's Customs Act — How "Declare, Pass Inspection, Obtain Permission" Came to Be Written

日本語で読む →

Every export from Japan and every import into it rests on one sentence. From the unjōsho of 1859 to the single name "customs" in 1872, the Customs Act of 1899 and its full revision in 1954 — whose sponsor told the Diet it would "put into writing points that had been left to administrative practice or interpretation". What permission actually switches on the cargo, the day in 1966 when the person who calculates the duty changed, and the exception to "inspection" that came in 1996.

English version of an article first published in Japanese on October 28, 2024 and rewritten in September 2026.

Article 67 of Japan's Customs Act is a single sentence.

Pursuant to the provisions of Cabinet Order, a person seeking to export or import cargo must declare to the Director General of Customs the cargo's product name, its quantity and price (or the quantity and value forming the basis for assessing duties, for cargo being imported (excluding cargo subject to a special declaration)), and other necessary particulars, and obtain permission from the Director General of Customs after passing through the necessary cargo inspection.

Its heading is "Permission for Export or Import". Whatever leaves Japan and whatever enters it, the legal basis is the same sentence.

Declare, pass inspection, obtain permission. These three steps became the text of a statute in 1954. Before that, the same thing was done not on the strength of a written provision but by administrative practice and interpretation.

Terms of the Customs Act in this article follow the English translation published in Japan's government database, Japanese Law Translation. That translation is for reference only and has no legal force: only the Japanese text is authoritative, and the translation reflects amendments up to 2018 (Act No. 16 of 2018). Every article quoted here was checked against the current Japanese text on e-Gov (as in force from June 1, 2026), and the passages quoted have not changed in substance. Quotations from the Diet record and from Japan Customs' own publications are our own translations.

Contents

  1. 1859: the unjōsho
  2. November 28, 1872: one name, "customs"
  3. The Customs Act of 1899
  4. 1954: "putting into writing what had been left to administrative practice or interpretation"
  5. What else the same bill cleared away
  6. Permission switches the cargo's status
  7. March 31, 1966: two laws on the same day
  8. An exception to "inspection"
  9. The office you declare to was freed
  10. Permission is an administrative disposition
  11. Where the three steps came from

1859: the unjōsho

The forerunner of Japan Customs was the unjōsho (運上所), literally an office for collecting unjō, a levy on trade.

The first were set up in 1859, in the sixth year of the Ansei era, at the ports of Nagasaki, Kanagawa and Hakodate. Besides supervising cargo going in and out and collecting duty, they also handled diplomatic business. They were opened one by one as each port opened to foreign trade, and offices followed at Hyōgo (Kobe), Kawaguchi (Osaka), Niigata and Edo.

In this period Japan could not set its own tariffs. Japan Customs sums it up at the head of its own historical timeline:

With the commercial treaties concluded with foreign countries in the early Meiji period, Japan lost its tariff autonomy, among other things, and was heavily constrained in its tariff policy.

With the recovery of tariff autonomy in the late Meiji period, it became possible to secure customs revenue and to protect Japanese industry in overseas trade.

So the procedure at the ports existed before the country had the power to decide the rates.

November 28, 1872: one name, "customs"

The unjōsho were not called the same thing at every port.

On November 28 of the fifth year of Meiji (1872), the name was unified as zeikan (税関), "customs". This is the date given as the formal founding of Japan Customs. The customs timeline quotes the proclamation of the day. Rendered into English, it says:

The offices at each of the open ports have until now been called by differing names — some "customs", some "unjōsho" — with no consistency, which is inconvenient; from now on…

At some ports it was "customs", at others "unjōsho", and that was inconvenient.

It began with getting the name to match.

The Customs Act of 1899

Japan's Customs Act, as a statute, dates from 1899, the 32nd year of Meiji.

The fact can be confirmed in the Diet record fifty-five years later. On March 3, 1954, in the House of Representatives Finance Committee, Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Finance Koshiro Ueki explained the reasons for proposing a new Customs Act bill.

First of all, the present Customs Act was enacted in Meiji 32 [1899], and since, from the standpoint of present-day legislation, some of its terminology and the like are not considered appropriate, we have revised it in its entirety and…

"The present Customs Act was enacted in Meiji 32." In other words, as of 1954 the legal basis of Japanese customs was more than half a century old.

1954: "putting into writing what had been left to administrative practice or interpretation"

The heart of this article is in how that explanation continues.

…revised it in its entirety, merging the Bonded Warehouse Act and the Bonded Factory Act into the Customs Act and abolishing the provisions on government-run bonded warehouses, as well as putting into writing points that had until now been left to administrative practice or interpretation, and so on — putting the provisions in order from the standpoint of modernizing the law.

Putting into writing points that had until now been left to administrative practice or interpretation.

It was not that the law came first and practice followed it. For many years the procedure at the ports had run on established practice on the ground and on the authorities' interpretation. The full revision of 1954 was the work of writing down the way it ran.

The order of the provisions reflects that character. Article 67 stands at the head of Section 1, General Provisions, of Chapter VI, Clearance of Cargo, and deals with export and import together in one sentence. The whole procedure is stated first in a single sentence, and the details are left to the articles that follow.

The bill passed: the Customs Act, Act No. 61 of April 2, 1954. It is the Customs Act still in use today.

What else the same bill cleared away

The 1954 explanation lists matters dealt with along the way. They show what customs was carrying at the time.

The Bonded Warehouse Act and the Bonded Factory Act were merged into the Customs Act, and the provisions on government-run bonded warehouses were abolished. The rules on storing cargo in bonded areas, the supervisory provisions on storage charges, and the obligation of bonded warehouse licensees to provide security were abolished, to lighten the burden on warehouse operators and others.

Entry procedures for vessels and aircraft engaged in foreign trade were simplified, and the documents to be submitted for import procedures were to be kept to a minimum.

From the standpoint of respecting private rights, the scope of administrative relief against dispositions by customs was widened.

And, next to the reorganization of the penal provisions, a single line:

…we have decided to abolish the so-called third-party informant system.

This was the system of rewarding third parties who reported smuggling and similar offences. It was abolished in the 1954 revision. Bills amending the Income Tax Act and the Corporation Tax Act, before the same Diet session, likewise included the abolition of a third-party informant system.

Finally, there were ports to add.

In view of recent trade results and the like, seven ports including Chiba, Aburatsu and Matsuyama are to be added to the appended table as open ports, while Ryōtsu, which already lacks the legal qualification to remain an open port, is to be removed from the table.

The list of open ports was an appended table to the Act, and ports came and went from it according to their trade. The Customs Act carries geographical tables like this too.

Permission switches the cargo's status

What Article 67's "permission" actually does becomes clear from the definitions, in Article 2 of the Act.

"export" means sending domestic cargo out to a foreign country;

"foreign cargo" means cargo that has been given export permission, or cargo that has arrived in Japan from abroad (including marine products caught on the open sea by a foreign vessel) and that is in the time before permission is given for its import;

"domestic cargo" means cargo in Japan that is not foreign cargo, or marine products that are caught on the open sea by a Japanese vessel;

Put side by side, they say this.

The moment cargo is given export permission, it becomes foreign cargo. It may still be standing on a Japanese quay, not yet loaded on the ship; in law it is already foreign.

The moment import is permitted, foreign cargo becomes domestic cargo. Between arrival and permission, the cargo is inside Japan's territory and still foreign cargo.

Permission is placed in the law as a switch that changes the cargo's legal status. That is why a system of bonded areas is needed: without places where cargo can stay as foreign cargo, goods that have arrived would have nowhere to go. The Bonded Warehouse Act and the Bonded Factory Act were merged into the Customs Act in 1954 because the two were the front and back of the same mechanism.

March 31, 1966: two laws on the same day

The wording of Article 67 has barely changed. What changed is what goes into the declaration it requires.

On March 31, 1966, two laws were promulgated on the same day.

One was the Act Partially Amending the Customs Tariff Act (Act No. 37 of 1966). It revised the Act's appended tariff schedule in its entirety to align it with the Brussels Tariff Nomenclature. The whole classification of goods was replaced.

The other was the Act Partially Amending the Customs Act and Other Acts (Act No. 36 of 1966). It inserted a new Article 6-2 into the Customs Act. As it reads today:

The amount of customs duties is determined by applying the system specified in each of the following items for the category of customs duty set forth therein:

(i) a customs duty other than one as set forth in the following item: the system of determining the amount of customs duties that is payable or establishing that there is no amount of customs duties payable based on a declaration made by the person liable to pay customs duties, in principle; … (hereinafter referred to as the "self-assessment system");

(ii) the customs duties set forth in the following items: the system of determining the amount of customs duties that is payable exclusively by disposition of the Director General of Customs (hereinafter referred to as the "official assessment system")

The calculation of the duty moved from customs to the person liable to pay it. Material from the Ministry of Finance summarizes it this way: at one time all imported cargo was under the official assessment system, and in 1966 general cargo was changed to the self-assessment system.

The same law also rewrote the wording of Article 6, on who is liable to pay customs duties. Where it had said that duty was to be collected from the person who made the import declaration, it now says that "a person that imports cargo has the obligation to pay customs duties." The person liable was redefined as the one who imports, not the one who declares.

The classification table was replaced, and the party who calculates the duty was replaced, by two laws promulgated on the same day. From that day on, the single word "declare" in Article 67 carried a good deal more.

The Customs Business Act, which governs customs brokers, was enacted the following year, in 1967, and post-clearance audit of imported cargo was introduced in 1968. A system in which people calculate and declare the duty themselves needs a way of checking afterwards, and rules for the profession that files declarations on others' behalf. The set took three years to complete.

An exception to "inspection"

The provision says "after passing through the necessary cargo inspection".

According to the Japan Customs timeline, an immediate import permission upon arrival system was introduced in 1996. For cargo that is not going to be inspected, import permission is given as soon as the import declaration is made after arrival.

This is where the word "necessary" in "the necessary cargo inspection" does its work. The law does not assume that everything is examined, so whatever has been decided will not be examined can be let through at once.

Underneath this lay the electronic filing of declarations. NACCS went into operation for air cargo (Air-NACCS) in 1978 and for sea cargo (Sea-NACCS) in 1991. The procedure was no longer a matter of carrying paper to a counter and waiting in line, and only because of that could a phrase like "upon arrival" mean anything.

The office you declare to was freed

There is another case where an assumption behind the provision moved. Article 67-2 sets out which Director General of Customs a declaration is made to.

An export or import declaration must be made to the Director General of Customs having jurisdiction over the location of a bonded area or other such place … when cargo subject to the declaration is brought in for the purpose of obtaining export or import permission.

The declaration goes to the Director General with jurisdiction over the place where the cargo is. That is the principle. In a system built on the assumption that the cargo will be looked at, filing with the office near the cargo makes sense.

On October 8, 2017, an exception was made to this principle. Operators certified under the AEO (Authorized Economic Operator) programme — authorized exporters, authorized importers and authorized customs brokers — may now declare to the head of any customs office, wherever the cargo is. It is known as the liberalization of the customs office of declaration.

It is limited to operators that have been examined and certified in advance. The principle of filing near the cargo is still there; it is lifted only where a different safeguard, certification, stands in its place.

Permission is an administrative disposition

The permission in Article 67 is an administrative disposition, and so the law provides somewhere to take an objection to it.

Article 89 of the Customs Act:

Any person may request re-investigation if the person is dissatisfied with dispositions made by the Director General of Customs as prescribed in the provisions of this Act or any other laws concerning customs duties.

This provision is why export and import permits carry a printed note beginning "If you are dissatisfied with a disposition based on this declaration…". Either a request for re-investigation to the Director General of Customs, or a request for review to the Minister of Finance. The period, three months from the day after the disposition became known, is also set by law.

When the 1954 explanation spoke of "widening the scope of administrative relief against dispositions by customs, from the standpoint of respecting private rights", it was this line of provisions it had in mind. Writing the port procedure into law also meant laying down a path for objecting to it.

Where the three steps came from

Declare, pass inspection, obtain permission.

These three steps were not designed on a desk by the law. In 1859 the unjōsho were set up, and a procedure that ran under different names at different ports had its name made uniform in 1872 and took the form of a statute in 1899. For half a century after that it was operated by practice and interpretation without being written into the text. That is what the full revision of 1954 meant by "putting into writing points that had until now been left to administrative practice or interpretation".

Even after it was written down, the content kept moving. In 1966 the party that calculates the duty changed; in 1978 and 1991 declarations went electronic; in 1996 a category of cargo appeared that does not pass through inspection; and in 2017 the tie to the office near the cargo was lifted for certified operators.

The letters of the provision have hardly changed. "Declare", "pass inspection" and "obtain permission" each stand in the same place, while what each one holds has been replaced.

References

  • Customs Act (Act No. 61 of 1954), Articles 2, 6, 6-2, 67, 67-2 and 89. English quotations follow the reference translation in Japanese Law Translation (reflecting amendments up to Act No. 16 of 2018), checked against the current Japanese text on e-Gov Law Search (version in force from June 1, 2026).
  • Minutes of the National Diet (National Diet Library, Kokkai Kaigiroku search system) — quotations are our own translations
    • 19th Diet, House of Representatives Finance Committee, March 3, 1954 (explanation of the reasons for the Customs Act bill, Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Finance Koshiro Ueki: the present Act enacted in 1899; full revision; merger of the Bonded Warehouse Act and the Bonded Factory Act; putting into writing what had been left to administrative practice or interpretation; simpler entry procedures and fewer documents; wider administrative relief; abolition of the third-party informant system; seven ports including Chiba, Aburatsu and Matsuyama added as open ports and Ryōtsu removed)
  • Act Partially Amending the Customs Act and Other Acts (Act No. 36 of 1966, March 31, 1966): new Article 6-2, amendment of Article 6
  • Act Partially Amending the Customs Tariff Act (Act No. 37 of 1966, March 31, 1966): full revision of the appended tariff schedule
  • Ministry of Finance, Council on Customs, Tariff, Foreign Exchange and Other Transactions, Customs Tariff Subcommittee, meeting material (October 17, 2025): all imported cargo formerly under the official assessment system, general cargo changed to self-assessment in 1966; Customs Business Act enacted 1967; post-clearance audit introduced 1968
  • Japan Customs, "History of Customs" and timeline (1859 unjōsho at Nagasaki, Kanagawa and Hakodate; name unified as "customs" on November 28, Meiji 5; loss of tariff autonomy in the early Meiji period and its recovery in the late Meiji period; 1978 Air-NACCS; 1991 Sea-NACCS; 1996 immediate import permission upon arrival)
  • Japan Customs, on the liberalization of the customs office of export and import declaration (in effect from October 8, 2017; authorized exporters, authorized importers and authorized customs brokers may declare to the head of any customs office)

Related articles