FX licensee screening — 2026-09-17

Working classification of the complete DA=0 pull: 91,956 FX records, MIC update date 2026-09-16. Counts are returned licence records, not links or sites. Source and generated CSVs remain outside Git.

Government and utilities are outside the present search. Named NTT, KDDI and SoftBank entities are set aside. Other telecoms are assessed individually; size or affiliation alone does not exclude them.

Following the initial classification, Alex excluded NHK, Seibu Railway and Okinawa Cellular from the present search, and asked to skip Optage for now. Optage's possible provision of transport to the tracked operators remains an open question; skipping it is not a finding that it has no such role. The DA=1 pull therefore covers the six matched operators from existing operator research below.

Initial top-200 classification

A gpt-5.6-luna subagent classified the first 200 rows of licensee-counts.csv; the parent checked identities and counts against that input. This includes the undisclosed bucket at rank 2, which is not one licensee.

The table records the initial classification; the subsequent exclusions above supersede its review dispositions. The six matched operators from existing operator research are all below rank 200. The top-200 exercise alone therefore misses them.

Corporate-number prefixes

The first digit is the check digit. NTA's table specifies these prefixes of the remaining 12-digit base number (source and selected translation):

These identify 70,218 records in this pull. Local public bodies include prefectures and municipalities; 000020 does not mean municipality alone. Registered-company numbers contain registry-office and organization codes, which do not classify business activity. They cannot separate utilities from telecoms or identify HF operators. Missing government prefixes do not establish that an entity is a private business.

Initial DA=1 review targets

Matching the Japanese operator corporate numbers finds six operators with 44 FX records. Two other retained companies have the MIC purpose 電気通信業務用 (telecommunications business use).

Initial total: eight groups, 265 FX records, narrowed to six groups / 44 records after skipping Optage and Okinawa Cellular. DATACOM and Ermis do not carry the telecommunications-purpose label, so requiring that label would miss known research targets. These are initial review targets, not an exhaustive operator list. DA=0 supplies no frequencies to establish which records are microwave.

No disclosed FX corporate-number match was found for 4HF (7010401155253), Sora Communications (3010003039016), or DRW-NX Japan (6010003040202, separate from NuVo). That is not evidence that they have no licences or operations.

Broader company review inventory and files

A name-based pass retains 291 groups / 2,018 records whose names contain 株式会社, 有限会社, 合同会社, 合名会社 or 合資会社, after setting aside names containing 電力, 電源開発, ガス, 瓦斯, 発電, 水道 or 送配電, and the exact corporate numbers of NTT DOCOMO, NTT East, NTT West, KDDI and SoftBank. Name matching uses NFKC; output preserves original names and numbers. This is a preliminary review inventory, not a researched sector classification; it can retain utility affiliates and omit businesses without those company forms.

Artifacts: /data/brific/japan_mic/2026-09-17-fx-screen/.

• top200-classified.csv: category, disposition, reason, and source where researched.
• business-name-review.csv and business-name-exclusions.csv: inspectable name screen.
• suspect-competitors.csv: nine existing research identities, including unmatched ones.
• da1-review-targets.csv: eight targets with prepared DA=1 request URLs.
• summary.json, screen.py: counts and the one-off aggregation script.

The prepared URLs search by licensee name; returned identities must be checked when fetched. The archived screening CSVs retain the initial review dispositions; the scope update at the top of this note governs the subsequent DA=1 pull.