For agents

Give your agent Japanese law it can cite.

19,675 provisions, available as plain text in Japanese and English with a source on every line. No key, no SDK, no sign-up — the same URLs a person reads, with one prefix.

japanlaw.org/md/en/labor-standards-act/art-36

…the employer may extend the working hours or have a worker work on a day off, in accordance with the provisions of that agreement.

Labor Standards Act, Article 36 · Ministry of Justice translation

The whole thing, in one line

Put /md in front of the URL of any law or provision and the same text comes back as Markdown. That is the whole convention.

what a person reads

https://japanlaw.org/en/labor-standards-act/art-36

the same thing, for an agent

curl https://japanlaw.org/md/en/labor-standards-act/art-36

What the collection holds, how the addresses are built and where it is thin are all in /llms.txt. It is generated from the database, so it always describes the corpus as it is now.

How an address is built

An address is built from the provision's own legal designation, never from its position in the document — which is why it survives the amendments that insert 第三十二条の三の二 between two existing articles and leave 削除 where one was repealed.

art-36: 第三十六条·Article 36
art-32-3-2/par-2/item-3: 第三十二条の三の二第二項第三号·Article 32-3-2, paragraph (2), item (iii)
appdx-1/item-6: 別表第一第六号·Appended Table 1, item (vi)
suppl-3221-49/art-2: 附則第二条·Supplementary Provisions, Article 2

a whole law

curl https://japanlaw.org/md/en/labor-standards-act

the form that cannot rot — the government's own law ID, redirects to the readable URL

curl -L https://japanlaw.org/l/322AC0000000049/art-36

full-text search, JSON, either language

curl 'https://japanlaw.org/api/search?q=時間外労働'
curl 'https://japanlaw.org/api/search?q=overtime&limit=5'

What comes back

Not just the text. Which law and which article, which version is in force, who produced each line of English, and what the provision cites and is cited by — all inside the same document.

excerpt of /md/en/labor-standards-act/art-36 — […] marks what is left out

# 労働基準法 / Labor Standards Act — 第三十六条

- Law: 労働基準法 (Labor Standards Act), 昭和二十二年法律第四十九号
- English title "Labor Standards Act": Ministry of Justice translation
- Kind: Act — the distinction between 法律 (Act), 政令 (Cabinet Order), 省令 (Ministerial Ordinance) and 条例 (local ordinance) decides who may issue it and what it may say.
- Provision: 第三十六条（時間外及び休日の労働）
- Text in force since: 2026-07-17
- Canonical URL: https://japanlaw.org/en/labor-standards-act/art-36
- Permanent URL (e-Gov law ID, never renamed): https://japanlaw.org/l/322AC0000000049/art-36
- Japanese text: e-Gov 法令検索, Digital Agency (デジタル庁). English: as marked on each line below.

[…]

### 第三十六条（時間外及び休日の労働） — (Off-Hours Work and Work on Days Off)
<sup>caption: Ministry of Justice translation — Japanese Law Translation Database System</sup>

**第一項**  使用者は、当該事業場に、労働者の過半数で組織する労働組合がある場合においてはその労働組合、労働者の過半数で組織する労働組合がな […]
Notwithstanding the provisions on working hours in Articles 32 through 3 […]
<sup>Ministry of Justice translation — Japanese Law Translation Database […]

[…]

## Cites
- 第三十二条から第三十二条の五まで → 労働基準法 art-32 — https://japanlaw.org/l/322AC0000000049/art-32

[…]

## Cited by

69 provisions cite this one. No official source publishes this direction.

- 労働基準法 第三十二条の三の二第一項 — https://japanlaw.org/l/322AC0000000049/art-32-3-2/par-1
[…]

Wiring it into the tool you use

There is nothing to install. If your agent can fetch a URL, all it needs is to be told where to look. Paste one of these into whichever instruction file your tool already reads.

Claude Code — in CLAUDE.md, or as a skill

CLAUDE.md

## Japanese law

When a question turns on Japanese statute, fetch it from japanlaw.org rather
than answering from memory.

- Start with https://japanlaw.org/llms.txt — it lists what is held and how to
  address it.
- Any provision as Markdown: https://japanlaw.org/md/en/<law-slug>/<address>
- Search: https://japanlaw.org/api/search?q=<query> — works in either language
  and returns the address of every hit.

Quote the attribution line that comes back with each paragraph. If it says
machine translation, say so. Link the reader to the canonical URL, and remind
them that only the Japanese text as published by the government has legal
effect.

Cursor — a rule in .cursor/rules

.cursor/rules/japanese-law.mdc

---
description: Look up Japanese statutes instead of recalling them
---

Japanese statute text and its English translation live at japanlaw.org.
Read https://japanlaw.org/llms.txt first, then fetch
https://japanlaw.org/md/en/<law-slug>/<address> for the provision itself.
Always carry through the source line printed under each English paragraph.

Codex, and anything else

The file has a different name; the content is the same. If you are defining tools instead, three are enough.

three fetches

GET https://japanlaw.org/llms.txt                       # what is here, and its limits
GET https://japanlaw.org/api/search?q={query}           # find the provision
GET https://japanlaw.org/md/{lang}/{law}/{address}      # read it, with sources

Two rules that keep the answer honest

Carry the attribution through

Every English paragraph is marked as the Ministry of Justice's translation or as this site's machine translation. Passing the second off as the first is the most damaging thing an answer built on this data can do. Keep the distinction in what you hand back.

Point back to the official original

Only the Japanese text as published by the government has legal effect; every English rendering, the Ministry of Justice's included, is a reference. Include the permanent link so the reader can check the original before acting, and do not present any of it as legal advice.

What you cannot get yet

The text in force, and each text an amendment not yet in force will leave — the latter at /<lang>/<slug>/amendments/<date>_<amending law>/text. Texts from before the amendments this site has held are not fetched, and there is no @date URL form yet.
8 laws are held — a small part of what e-Gov publishes. A citation into a law that is not here is marked and left unresolved.
A citation the text does not determine is never resolved to a guess. Pointing at nothing beats pointing at the wrong article.
There is no MCP server yet. Fetch over HTTP for now.

llms.txt Open a provision as Markdown The collection