A Snapshot of Japanese Competition Law Developments and What to Look for

CPI Asia Column edited by Vanessa Yanhua Zhang (Global Economics Group) present:

A Snapshot of Japanese Competition Law Developments and What to Look for – By Atsushi Yamada (Anderson Mori & Tomotsune)

Overview

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), led by Chairman Kazuyuki Sugimoto, seems to have become very active in various areas of competition law and enforcement in the past year or so. In his 4^th year as Chairman, Mr. Sugimoto is taking an even more active lead. Although there has been a downturn in the number of cartel cases brought by the JFTC in recent years, it is too early to conclude that the enforcement activities by the JFTC have weakened. Rather, there is so much activity in other areas that it is easily arguable that the JFTC has become more active than ever.

Cartels

As mentioned above, if only looking at the statistics of cartel cases, cartel enforcement by the JFTC appears to have weakened. Indeed, in each of fiscal years (“FY”) 2014 and 2015, the JFTC only issued formal orders for seven cases, respectively; whereas, during the three years prior to 2014, it had been issuing formal orders for 15 to 20 cases annually. We have seen a similar trend with respect to leniency applications. The number of applications annually declined to 50 and 61, respectively, for FY 2013 and FY 2014, whereas there were more than 100 applications made annually between FY 2010 to FY 2012. However, there might be a shift in this trend, since in FY 2015 the number of len