When submitting commercial registration applications online, the Ministry of Justice has approved CloudSign as a legitimate method of applying electronic signatures (electronic certificates) for attached supporting documents.

Please verify the following when submitting an online application using “documents concluded with CloudSign” as attached supporting documents.

Obtain an “Electronic certificate of commercial registration(*),” which will be used in place of the representative director’s seal, from the Legal Affairs Bureau before submitting an application online.

See the Ministry of Justice homepage for how to obtain the certificate.

* An electronic certificate that can be used for submitting online applications, notifications and other matters to national or local government entities.

If the representative director and president (person who submitted the seal to the Legal Affairs Bureau) is included in the party who applied an electronic signature to attached documents using CloudSign, an electronic signature with electronic certificate of commercial registration must be applied.

To apply an electronic signature with an electronic certificate of commercial registration to files with an electronic signature applied by CloudSign, please use “ShinseiyoSogoSoft.application.”

See the “Online applications for commercial and corporate registration” on the Ministry of Justice homepage for specific details on the application method.

In addition to the “Tips for applying online for commercial registration” above, please check the following two points.

In order to comply with Article 225, Item 2 of the Ordinance for Enforcement of the Companies Act, a record of the decision made by all board directors and auditors present must be saved in the appropriate electronic file.

As such, the minutes must be sent via CloudSign to the email addresses of directors and auditors that are used for their usual work duties when applying an electronic signature in order to ascertain that the decision to apply the signature has been made by the actual person.

By doing so,the registering clerk can visually check the records.

The list of names in the record of minutes and the signature panel are also checked as part of the Legal Affairs Bureau (recording office) procedures, to verify that the electronic signature has been applied by the actual person.

Note that the name,email address, and the authentication method used of the office representative uploading the minutes to CloudSign to send it to each board member recorded in the signature panel will be treated as complementary records, and is not a problem with regards to registration screening.

As outlined in 1., a legitimate electronic signature is applied as long as an email address used by the actual person is utilized to provide consent via CloudSign.

As such, there is no need to obtain an individual electronic certificate from each director and auditor.