Japan's transport ministry has opened a four-week public comment window on a cabinet order that would strip itself of a piece of paperwork: certifying truck relay transport implementation plans for businesses that operate entirely within a single regional transport bureau's jurisdiction. Under the draft, that sign-off moves from the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in Tokyo to the head of whichever regional transport bureau, or transport supervision department, covers that jurisdiction.
The change follows a bigger reform. An amendment to the Act on Promotion of Logistics Efficiency (Act No. 21 of 2026), promulgated on May 20, 2026, created a new certification system for "truck relay transport implementation plans," the filings operators submit to run relay operations under the law. That parent law also gave the ministry a general option to delegate its Chapter Three powers over relay-transport promotion to its regional offices, as specified by future cabinet order. This draft is that order.
In practice, the delegation covers approval and related authority under Articles 29-6, 29-7 and 29-13 of the amended law, but only for truck relay transport businesses that run entirely inside one regional transport bureau's jurisdiction. The draft text does not spell out what happens to businesses spanning more than one bureau's jurisdiction beyond stating the single-region limit; those cases appear to stay with the ministry by omission rather than explicit rule. Operators running relay transport businesses confined to a single bureau's jurisdiction would in future file with their regional bureau instead of routing paperwork through Tokyo.
Most of the rest of the draft order is housekeeping rather than new policy. Because the parent law renumbered its own definitions article, cross-references scattered through the enforcement order, covering small-business size criteria, warehouse-industry definitions and shipper weight thresholds, needed updating to match the new numbering. None of those edits change substantive thresholds; a small-business rubber-goods manufacturer, for example, is still capped at three hundred million yen in capital and nine hundred employees, just referenced under a renumbered clause.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Public comment opens | August 26, 2026 |
| Public comment closes | September 25, 2026 |
| Planned Cabinet decision | Early October 2026 |
| Scheduled enforcement | November 1, 2026 |
The comment period runs from August 26 to September 25, 2026, giving trucking operators, industry groups and local governments a month to respond before the ministry finalizes anything. Questions about the draft go to MLIT's Freight Distribution Management Strategy Office, part of its Logistics and Automobile Bureau. The ministry's own schedule calls for a cabinet decision in early October 2026 and enforcement from November 1, 2026, timed to match when the underlying relay-transport certification system itself takes effect. Nothing here is final until the comment window closes and the cabinet acts on the timetable it has set for itself.