Build date proof › Japan
Production period read off a government recall notice
Japanese recall notices pair exact chassis-number blocks with exact production periods. If your chassis number falls inside a block, your car was built inside that window. It brackets; it does not pin.
- covers
- Any Japanese vehicle
- issuer
- MLIT recall database, and manufacturers' own recall pages
- cost
- Free
- time
- An hour of your own time
Build date
States when the car was built. This is the date every import rule is measured from.
What you have to supply
The chassis number and the model code.
Who can order it
The MLIT database runs from 15 April 1993 to the present - the whole window that matters for the 25-year rule. Before 1993 you must ask MLIT or the manufacturer.
Limits and gaps
MLIT cannot be searched by chassis number; you search by model and read the ranges yourself. Manufacturers' own tools take a chassis number but return only a yes or no, not the production window - you need both. A model with no recalls gives you nothing.
Notes
The real technique is to find every recall your chassis number falls inside and intersect the production periods. Two or three overlapping recalls can narrow an eighteen-month window to a couple of months. It is an inference, not a certificate, and no authority formally accepts it - but it is free, it is government-published, and you can show your working.
Checked against the issuer's own page issuer page · retrieved 25 September 2026
The Build Date Proof Pack
This page tells you which document to order. The pack gets it ordered — and tells you what to do when the answer is that no document exists.
- A ready-to-send request for every archive, in the language it wants
- Exactly which numbers to photograph, and where they are on the car
- What to ask the seller for before you pay the deposit
- The fallback ladder when the manufacturer has no records
- What US, Canadian and Australian officials each accept as proof