Most foreign founders setting up in Japan default to a KK — kabushiki kaisha, the joint-stock company — because it's the form that sounds like a real company. That assumption costs about ¥150,000 and a few weeks of avoidable paperwork. A GK — godo kaisha, modelled loosely on the US LLC — is cheaper to incorporate ([VERIFY: ~¥100k vs ~¥250k]), doesn't need a notary, and works fine for the majority of small operating businesses. Amazon Japan, Apple Japan, and Google Japan are all GKs. The form does not signal what most people assume it signals.
The entity choice is the easy part. The harder questions are the rules underneath: when you can incorporate, what counts as paid-in capital, what banks will accept, and in what order to do all of it.
Since the 2015 reform, non-residents can incorporate a Japanese company without a Japan-resident director on the board. [VERIFY: 2015 Company Law amendment removing local-director requirement] That changed everything for founders trying to set up before they arrive. You can now register the entity from abroad, secure a registered address, and have the company exist on paper before you ever land.
The trap is what comes next. Most founders try to do entity → bank → visa in that order, because incorporation is the simplest step. But Japanese banks won't open a corporate account for a company with no resident director and no real address — and the Business Manager visa application won't get traction without a bank account showing your paid-in capital. The result is a deadlock that kills more first attempts than the visa rules themselves.
The October 2025 visa reform made the capital question much sharper. The legal minimum to incorporate a KK or GK is still ¥1. The visa minimum is now [VERIFY: ¥30M]. There is an alternative track at [VERIFY: ¥10M] if you hire a full-time employee with N2-level Japanese, but the calculations get more complex from there.
We see two failure modes. First, founders capitalise the company at the legal minimum, then realise after incorporation that they cannot fund themselves up to the visa floor without it looking like a structuring exercise. Second, founders fund at ¥30M from day one but cannot show the source of funds cleanly, which trips both bank onboarding and visa adjudication.
What follows is the practical sequence: how to choose between KK and GK on the criteria that actually matter, how to incorporate cleanly from outside Japan, and how to plan capital under the new rules without painting yourself into a corner.