A seal registration certificate is a certified document to make sure authenticity of seal impression stamped on a document. You are required to submit “Inkan registration certificate” when applying for something or going through important procedure like buying or selling a car, making notarial document and so on.
To have “Inkan registration certificate” issued, you need to register your Hanko at a municipality. Jitsu-In and Ginko-In are to be stamped in very important situation so an impression of your hanko you’re supposed to register must be complex enough to keep it from being imitated. If you select mass-produced product, you run a risk that your Hanko is falsified.
Inkan registration certificate can be roughly distinguished between Corporation seal and Individual seal.
Individual Inkan registration certificate
In accordance with requirement of seal regulations enacted by municipality that issues resident card, you submit seal impression and register your hanko on seal registration ledger of municipality. Therefore, you cannot register your Hanko in other provinces where you don’t register as resident to municipality.
If you don’t need to register your Hanko, you need to. In that sense, you have option of whether or not you register your Hanko. Seal regulations which is ground for seal registration are enacted by each municipality so there are regional difference in regulation details.
We don’t have a law unifying these regulations. However, if you take a look what these say, you can realize mostly these details are the same.
Corporate Inkan registration certificate
The treatment of corporate seal is regulated in Commercial Registration law and
article 20, first paragraph of Commercial Registration law says ” A Hanko to be stamped on registration form of a company needs to be submitted to Regional Legal Affairs Bureau beforehand. ” So if you start up business in Japan, you need to submit both your Hanko and registration form at Regional Legal Affairs Bureau. In contrast to individual, you don’t have any choice but to register you Hanko officially. After you are certified that “Inkan” card is issued, you can request the registry office to issue Inkan registration certificate.
How can you register your Hanko?
Individual can request a registry office to issue a certificate of your registered Hanko with “Inkan” card after the registration is completed. This certificate is called formally “Hanko registration certificate”, which is issued by municipality where you registered in accordance with seal regulations enacted by municipality.
For example, “Konbini Koufu” (issuance in convenience store) is one of services you can receive from “My Number Card” system, which is to get a certificate (such as certified copy of resident register and seal registration certificate) issued by each municipality from Kiosk terminal placed in convenience stores all over Japan. Additionally, the person whose residential city is different from permanent address can also get a census-register certificate.