Buy .jp Domain Name

General-use JP names are open to any individual, group or organisation that has a permanent postal address in Japan. The applicant does not need to be a Japanese national or to have set up a company in the country; what is required is the address. Organisational-type names such as co.jp or or.jp additionally expect a structure matching that type, and each registrant may hold only one name of that kind.

The permanent postal address requirement applies to all .jp registrations and is the first thing an applicant abroad has to resolve. A trustee service is offered to meet this need: it is a paid service and the current amount is shown during ordering. That lets you apply without opening a company or office in Japan. The address exists solely to satisfy the registration condition; it imposes no separate rule about where your site is hosted.

General-use .jp names are open to anyone with an address in Japan and do not look at the type of applicant. co.jp is one of the organisational types and is reserved for companies; in the same group, or.jp is for judicial persons, ne.jp for network service providers and ac.jp for educational institutions. In the organisational types each registrant may hold only one name, whereas general-use .jp carries no such limit.

Prefecture-type names put one of Japan's 47 prefecture names into the structure, as in yourbrand.tokyo.jp. They can be registered as freely as general-use names and are useful when you want the address itself to show that you operate in a particular city or region. For a local store, a branch or a regional campaign, this is the practical way to set up a separate address.

No. The trustee arrangement exists solely to satisfy the requirement for an address in Japan; the registrant record and the right to use the domain remain yours. Keeping the service running matters for the validity of the registration, because the condition applies throughout the registration period. Even if you change provider, the arrangement needs to continue, otherwise the registration condition stops being met.

.jp names can be moved between providers. A transfer does not remove the Japanese address requirement: it must still be met under the new record, and where a trustee service covers it, that arrangement is expected to continue. The remaining registration period is preserved after the move, and your site keeps running as long as you do not change name servers. You can start on the domain transfer page.

You can see whether a .jp name is registered, and the general state of the record, through WHOIS. Because of data protection obligations the registrant's contact details are published only in limited form, so a lookup will usually show the status of the name and its registration dates. Run the lookup on the whois search page, and check whether a name is still free with domain search.