Japan's designated additives and the standards for their use
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare; Consumer Affairs Agency · Japan
The additives the Minister has designated as permitted, and the standards that limit how many of them may be used.
No official English text of the standards exists, so the Japanese is the rule and anything in English beside it is this site's description of what the rule does.
How it is arranged
- Appended Table 1 to the Regulations for Enforcement of the Food Sanitation Act — the list of designated additives.
- The Specifications and Standards for Foods, Food Additives — the conditions of use, in Japanese.
- Three further categories sit outside the designated list: existing additives in use before 1995, natural flavouring agents, and ordinary foods used as additives.
What this site takes from it
The designated list, matched by name through the Ministry of Justice's unofficial English translation, and the standards for use, kept in the Japanese they are written in.
And what it does not
The three categories outside the designated list. An absence of a Japan row says nothing about Japan's rules.
Provenance
- jp Japan: List of Designated Additives (Appended Table 1, Regulations for Enforcement of the Food Sanitation Act) — Digital Agency, e-Gov Law Search (law text); Ministry of Justice, Japanese Law Translation (English names); Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 法令等データベース (standards for use). Public Data License 1.0 (compatible with CC BY 4.0) on all three sites — e-Gov, Japanese Law Translation and the MHLW website; statute text is excluded from copyright (Copyright Act, Art. 13); retrieved 2026-10-18.
Recorded on Sources, generated from the provenance table so it cannot drift from what the site holds.
Read the instrument. Where a page here disagrees with it, the instrument is right and this site is wrong — check the retrieval date first.