Every notification in Japan's MLIT recall registry is one of two things: a statutory recall (リコール) or an improvement campaign (改善対策). Of the 4,890 filings archived on this site — April 1993 through March 2026 — 4,502 (92.1%) are statutory recalls and 388 (7.9%) are improvement campaigns. In a listing the two look almost interchangeable: same filing format, same fields, same official source. But they mean different things, and as a buyer it pays to know how to read the label.
Two filing types, one registry
Broadly: a statutory recall is filed when vehicles may fail to conform to Japan's safety or environmental standards, and the manufacturer notifies MLIT and remedies the affected vehicles. An improvement campaign is a manufacturer-initiated corrective action, also filed with MLIT, for issues the manufacturer judges worth fixing even where a breach of the standards has not been established.
Those are working descriptions, not legal definitions — the formal criteria are set out by MLIT, and every filing page on this site links back to its official source entry so you can read the original. What matters for practical purposes is that both types carry the same actionable data: a filing number, a filing date, the affected model codes and serial ranges, the component concerned, the production period and the number of vehicles covered.
What the archive shows
The split is not uniform across the industry. As of mid-2026, the archive breaks down like this:
| Scope | Statutory recalls | Improvement campaigns | Campaign share |
|---|---|---|---|
| All filings, 1993–2026 | 4,502 | 388 | 7.9% |
| Toyota | 586 | 76 | 11.5% |
| Honda | 447 | 81 | 15.3% |
| Nissan | 847 | 75 | 8.1% |
| Year 2020 alone | 170 | 10 | 5.6% |
Honda routes nearly double the share of its filings through improvement campaigns compared with Nissan (15.3% vs 8.1%). We present the numbers as they stand in the registry — the archive records what was filed, not why a manufacturer chose one instrument over the other.
The volume also moves over time. Combined filing activity climbed from 15 notifications in 1993 to 118 in 2000, hit its all-time peak of 303 in 2004, and has since settled lower — 220 in 2015, 180 in 2020, 134 in 2025. Improvement campaigns stayed the clear minority throughout: even in 2020, only 10 of the year's 180 filings took the campaign route. Whatever era your import comes from, the overwhelming majority of entries you will meet in a chassis report are statutory recalls.
Does the label change what you should do?
As a buyer: not much. Both types describe factory-acknowledged defects with a defined fix, and both are worth treating as work that should have been completed on any car you are about to buy. An improvement campaign is not a lesser entry to be skimmed past — it went through the same official notification channel, names the same kind of serial ranges, and can cover very large vehicle populations.
The practical follow-up is identical for both: confirm the remedial work was actually done on your specific car. The registry records the filing, not the completion. Step 5 of our import recall check guide covers how to get that confirmation through the seller, the exporter, or the manufacturer's dealer network — and if the car is already in your country, ask the local distributor directly how they handle outstanding Japanese-market filings.
How the two types appear on this site
Every filing page in the Recall Archive is labeled "Statutory Recall" or "Improvement Campaign" right at the top, and the same label appears on every recall match in a chassis report. For an example of a statutory recall at full scale, see filing No. 1136050 — a Honda airbag recall filed July 9, 2015 covering 1,625,144 vehicles. The manufacturer hubs also show each maker's statutory/campaign split at a glance, so you can see how the make you are buying compares to the table above.
One thing you will not find here is a severity score. The registry does not rank filings, and we refuse to invent rankings that are not in the source data. What we give you is the complete official record, organized so you can read it quickly.
Check a specific vehicle
The fastest way to see which filings — of either type — apply to a car you are considering is to run its chassis number through the free decoder. The report matches the serial against every recorded range in the registry and links each match to its full filing page. For the wider picture, browse the archive by manufacturer or by year, and if several brands appear on one filing, our guide to joint recall filings explains what that means.