Find the village your family came from in Japan.

The koseki is Japan's family register. Each household has one, kept by the city office of its registered domicile (honseki). It records births, marriages, adoptions, deaths and moves for everyone in the household.

Japan's first registers (1872) have been withheld from everyone, descendants included, by the Ministry of Justice since 1968, because they recorded former social status. The oldest registers you can request are therefore the 1886 format. These still name people born well before 1886, often a household head born in the early 1800s. Under an older rule, a register was kept for only 80 years after everyone in it had died or moved away (the rule is now 150 years), and then discarded. So in some families the oldest register that survives is a later one, such as the 1898 format.

For the time before these registers, the only sources are temple death registers (if they survive) and village documents. They speak of the families of the name rather than of your own line. The Roots Report and Chronicle gather those.

Generally yes. Direct descendants (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren…) can request the registers of their direct ancestors. You will need documents that prove each link in the chain from you to the person in the register. Our free guide explains how.

The honseki is required to request a koseki. Common sources are immigration records and passports; alien registration; WWII incarceration records (War Relocation Authority files in the US; wartime internment records in Canada); and family letters and grave markers.

Wartime records often state the birthplace. Many families lost or destroyed Japanese papers during the war, so these records may be the only place it survives. A Roots Report includes guidance for finding it.

The Roots Snapshot shows where in that prefecture your surname is most common today. You get a map and a table of the towns with the most households of the name.

If the name points to one area, the Snapshot describes that area. If several areas remain, as they often do for a common name such as Tanaka or Nakamura, the Snapshot describes each of the top two or three areas in a short section of its own. It also tells you which family papers most often name the village: a passport, an immigration record, a wartime record or a grave marker. Our free guide, How to find your honseki, shows where to look.

Before you pay for a Roots Report, we tell you by email what it can cover with what you know.

Very often, yes. In Japan, a surname shared within one village means more than it usually does in North America. Many Japanese surnames come from place names, and in many rural areas a main household and its branch households shared one surname and lived in the same village for generations. People of that name there were often related.

Blood spreads further than a surname. A surname follows one line, from father to son; blood follows every line. We built a computer model of one district's villages, matched to recorded household numbers, and ran it 30 times. In a typical run, one couple of 1580 was an ancestor of about 7 in 10 of the district's households today. Counted from the 1280s, it was an ancestor of nearly all of them. The pattern held when we changed the model's assumptions, and it agrees with studies showing that the people of one region come to share most of their ancestors within a few centuries (Chang 1999; Rohde, Olson and Chang, Nature, 2004).

The model also shows why a single line is hard to follow: houses without sons adopted sons-in-law, who took the house's name. Our sample Roots Report explains this and lists the studies. The figures come from a model rather than from records, and where marriages stayed closer to home, the share was lower.

Yes. Most family registers on Okinawa Island were lost in 1945. The koseki rebuilt after the war usually begins with the household of about 1945, so it does not reach back into the 1800s as registers elsewhere in Japan do. Registers in the Miyako and Yaeyama islands were not lost in the same way.

Other records can take the line further back. Japan's passport registers list Okinawan emigrants from 1899 to 1941, with their home village and their relationship to the head of the household. The family's ancestral tablets (tōtōmē) and tomb inscriptions name earlier generations, and many Okinawan town histories list their emigrants. We read all of these in Japanese. If you tell us your emigrant ancestor's name, the Roots Report and the Koseki Family Tree include a search of the passport registers at no extra charge.

Okinawan surnames often have two readings: 金城 can be Kinjo or Kaneshiro. We write the name as your family spells it and note the other reading. If your rebuilt registers cover only a few generations, we tell you before you pay.

Many still exist. What survives differs from place to place, and families are sometimes told the registers were lost when some still exist. Hiroshima City Hall, about 1 km (0.6 mi) from the hypocenter, burned inside.

When a register was destroyed, Japan rebuilt it from the duplicate kept elsewhere, if that survived. If not, it was rebuilt from family declarations, and older registers whose members had all died or moved away were often not rebuilt. If your registers are gone, the office issues a notice saying so. We ask the office what survives for your family's domicile and tell you before you pay.

Yes. Our prices are in US dollars, and we send a secure payment link by email. You can pay with a credit or debit card from any country. Your card company converts the amount into your currency and may add a foreign transaction fee.

You can request it yourself, and we show you how; our free guide walks you through it. Under Japanese law, preparing official requests for others for a fee is reserved to licensed professionals. If you hire someone in Japan to request it for you, that person must be a licensed professional, and you contract and pay them directly.

No. Our reports are for genealogy and family history. They are not certified translations for immigration, nationality or court use.

Your documents are read in Japan by someone who reads Japanese as a first language. AI software makes a first reading, and then a person checks every entry by hand:

• against the original image, character by character, using the character forms of the time;
• against the other entries in the register: dates, ages and relationships must agree;
• for names that can be read more than one way, we give the kanji, the most likely reading and the other readings.

Only readings a person has confirmed appear in your report. Anything we cannot confirm is marked, with how sure we are.

A Chronicle is only as good as the records behind it. The Roots Report ($390) establishes which records survive for your ancestral village: local histories, temple records and old documents.

• If there is enough for a book, the Family Chronicle ($2,900, or $3,290 with the Report) or the Chronicle + Family Tree ($4,500, or $4,890 with the Report) builds on it. The Chronicle + Family Tree also needs your koseki registers.
• If there is not, we tell you so, and you need not buy anything more.

You pay for each step only when you decide to take it.

1. Send the order form below. Please don't attach images to it or to an email.
2. We email you a private upload code within a week.
3. Upload your images on our upload page with that code. Photos, scans and PDF files are all fine (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP or PDF, up to 15 MB each).
4. We check that the images are readable and email you the price and a payment link.
5. You pay, and we begin.

We look at your images before you order. If they are too faint or incomplete to decode, we tell you so and do not take the order.