Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) issued a formal recommendation on September 2 ordering Japan Post Co. to overhaul how it handles contracts with freelance workers, after finding the company failed to disclose required contract terms to 167 freelance contractors and missed statutory payment deadlines for 140 of them.
The violations ran from November 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025, and split into two distinct but overlapping failures under Japan's Freelance/Inter-Business Transaction Act.
| Violation | Contractors affected | Statutory requirement | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contract-term disclosure | 167 | Immediate written or electronic notice of deliverable content, fee amount and payment due date | Article 3(1) |
| Payment by deadline | 140 | Payment by the deadline set, or by the deemed deadline (the date goods or services were received) if none was set | Article 4(5) |
For all 167 contractors, whom the law classifies as "specified entrusted business operators", Japan Post did not immediately give written or electronic notice of all or part of the required contract terms, including deliverable content, remuneration amount and payment due date, as Article 3(1) of the law requires. A subset of 140 of those same contractors also went unpaid past deadline: Japan Post never set a payment date for them, so the date it received their work became the deemed deadline under Article 4(2), and the company still failed to pay by that date, breaching Article 4(5).
The affected work ranged well beyond mail delivery. Japan Post's outsourcing covered training delivery, mail and parcel delivery and pickup driving, attendance at expert-panel discussions, leaflet production, snow removal and weed clearing. Japan Post is capitalized at ¥700bn and headquartered in Tokyo's Otemachi district.
The recommendation does not impose a fine. It orders four things. Japan Post's board must pass a resolution formally acknowledging both violations and committing to disclose terms immediately and pay by deadline going forward. The company must audit every similar contract issued between November 1, 2024 and the September 2, 2026 recommendation date for the same disclosure and payment problems, and fix any it finds. It must build internal training and compliance systems for staff who commission freelance work. And it must notify its own board and employees, and the affected contractors themselves, of the recommendation and the steps it takes in response, then report those steps back to the JFTC.
The law behind the recommendation, formally the Act on the Proper Transaction of Specified Entrusted Business Operators, requires companies that hire freelancers to disclose terms immediately and set payment deadlines no longer than 60 days from delivery. If a company sets no deadline, the delivery date itself becomes the legal payment date by default. Running that standard against a household name rather than a small subcontractor gives other large outsourcers of gig-style labor a concrete template for what the JFTC treats as a violation, and what remediation it expects in response.