The US and Japan
Food additives permitted in one and not the other — and what each gap actually means.
245 additives are permitted in both. 444 are permitted in the US with no permission in Japan, none of them explicitly prohibited there. 62 are permitted in Japan with no permission in the US, none of them explicitly prohibited there.
A missing permission is rarely a ban. Usually no one has applied, the substance is named or grouped differently, or it falls under a different law. Only the first two groups below — prohibited, and removed — record a regulator’s decision against a substance, and even those are decisions about legal status, not findings this site draws about safety.
Permitted in the US, no permission in Japan
No Japanese designated-additive listing matched 444
This site imports Japan’s list of designated additives only, and matches it by English name. Japan also permits existing additives, natural flavouring agents and ordinary foods used as additives outside that list, and none of those are imported. Treat these as unconfirmed, not as absent.
What this page is not
It is not a list of unsafe additives, and a regulator permitting something is not this site’s endorsement of it. Regulators reach different decisions on the same evidence, on different applications, and at different times. Each additive’s page shows every jurisdiction’s status with its citation, and where an assessing body has published a reading of the evidence, that reading, attributed.
Counts are of this site’s additive pages, which follow the regulators’ own listings: a group entry in one jurisdiction can correspond to several pages in another. Status as retrieved from each source; see Sources for dates.