Recording meetings in Japan.

The Act on the Protection of Personal Information, the APPI, is the governing instrument, supervised by the Personal Information Protection Commission. It is built around specifying and notifying or publicising the purpose of use, which lands in a similar practical place to telling meeting participants why you are recording, though the legal machinery differs from the Regulation's.

We have not found a Japanese criminal provision that maps cleanly onto a participant recording a conversation they are taking part in, and we would rather say so than name one that does not fit. That means the analysis runs through the APPI and through employment obligations rather than through criminal law. Japan also holds an EU adequacy decision, on the basis of supplementary rules the PPC adopted for data received from the EEA, so personal data flows between the EEA and Japan without additional safeguards, and an organisation handling EEA data should know those supplementary rules exist.

The data protection instrument

個人情報の保護に関する法律 (Act on the Protection of Personal Information), APPI, Act No. 57 of 2003, as amended

Who supervises this

個人情報保護委員会 (Personal Information Protection Commission)

No single criminal provision on point

We have not found a criminal provision here that maps cleanly onto a participant recording a meeting they are taking part in, and we would rather say so than name an article that does not fit. The data protection obligations below still apply, and a local lawyer can confirm whether something specific to your situation does too.

What to do in practice

The practice below is not the legal minimum in every jurisdiction. It is the practice that is defensible in all of them, which is a more useful target when your calls cross borders.

• Say it out loud at the start, before anything substantive is discussed, and say what the recording is for. Not a line in the invite nobody read.
• Give people a real way to decline. An announcement that leaves no room to object is closer to a notification than to consent.
• Write it down. A line in the notes recording that the meeting was recorded, and that nobody objected, is worth more later than anyone's memory of the moment.
• Keep external meetings to a higher standard than internal ones. Colleagues share an employment context; a customer, a candidate, or a supplier does not.
• Decide how long you keep recordings, and actually delete them. Indefinite retention converts a small, well-handled recording into a growing liability.
• Treat sharing as a fresh decision. The question is not whether you were allowed to record, it is whether this particular person was meant to hear it.

Questions