Screen customers and counterparties in Japan against global sanctions and PEP data, with matching built for transliterated names and a decision record a supervisor can follow.
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What this covers
Screening in production for
Article 12(3) of the Order for Enforcement of the Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds reaches foreign PEPs and their families; it does not reach Japanese domestic officials. A group that screens to a wider international standard satisfies the Japanese one comfortably, but a Japan-only configuration can meet the statute and still fail a group policy. Screening for Japan therefore has to answer two questions at once: what the Act requires, and what your own risk assessment says.
PEP screening in Japan, domestic and international obligationsA Japanese customer may reach your screening engine in kanji, in katakana or as a Latin transcription, while sanctions and PEP lists are published mainly in Latin script. Screen the Japanese-script name in an Original Script Name field alongside the Romanised version, with matching that handles transliteration and phonetic variants, so the check does not depend on one spelling.
Japanese law brings a foreign PEP's spouse, parents, children and siblings into scope, as well as the spouse's parents and children and companies those people control. Screening and relationship data are handled together, so a family link surfaces rather than slipping past a name-only check.
Tune match sensitivity for the customer segments you actually serve, rather than one threshold for a domestic retail book and an international corporate book alike.
Customers are re-screened as lists change, because foreign PEP status in Japan does not expire and a customer marked "retired" at onboarding may still be in scope.
Every match keeps its source list, score, identifiers, reviewer and outcome, which is the record an inspection asks to see.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022Information security management, independently audited.
ISO/IEC 27701:2019Privacy information management, extending ISO 27001.
GDPRPersonal data handled to EU standards, wherever you operate.
DORAOperational resilience for EU financial entities and their vendors.Not as a statutory trigger. Article 12(3) of the Order for Enforcement covers foreign PEPs, their family members and companies they control, not members of the Diet, ministers or prefectural governors. A firm may still rate domestic political exposure as high risk under its own risk assessment, and many internationally active groups do.
The Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act supplies the sanctions layer. It obliges banks, funds transfer service providers, currency exchange operators and crypto-asset exchange service providers to confirm customer identity so that asset freezes take effect, with its own seven-year record retention rule.
Most kanji have several possible readings, so the written form does not fix the pronunciation, and the same name can arrive as kanji, hiragana, katakana or a Latin transcription. Matching that allows for transliteration and phonetic variants, narrowed by secondary identifiers such as date of birth, handles this better than exact spelling.
The screening product is the same. This page covers how it applies to organisations operating in Japan: the foreign PEP scope in Japanese law, the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act, and Japanese name data. The global page describes the product for every market.
A short walkthrough of screening, verification and ongoing monitoring in one platform, set to the thresholds and jurisdictions your programme actually uses.
