Japan — AFR
Japan's Advance Filing Rules — the pre-arrival cargo declaration every ocean import into Japan needs, filed to NACCS through GeTS.
Read Customs filing first for the flow. This page covers what is specific to Japan.
When the card appears
On any shipment discharging in Japan. AFR is an import filing; an export out of Japan does not need one.
What you file
One AFR declaration per house bill, before the vessel departs the last port of loading.
The Japan AFR filing card on an import shipment
What you need to have ready
Japan is the best-covered country we file: the shipment answers around three in four fields. What is left is mostly identity and cargo detail NACCS insists on.
From the shipment, and it must be complete:
Master bill, house bill, vessel, voyage, port of loading, port of discharge, ETD, ETA
Full party blocks — shipper, consignee and notify party, each with name, all three address lines, city, country and phone
That last point is the one that costs people time. NACCS is strict about parties in a way most systems are not:
If the first address line is filled but the second and third are empty, NACCS rejects the filing. If any party's country code is blank, it rejects it. A party is all-or-nothing.
The form flags every one of these before you submit, so you will not discover it from NACCS. But it does mean an incomplete consignee on the shipment becomes work at filing time.
You supply:
Carrier code and vessel call sign, where the shipment does not carry them
Container detail — see below
A completed AFR party block — NACCS wants the address split across three lines, and (edited) marks what the operator topped up
Containers are chosen per house bill
On a consolidation, the containers on the master are not all carried under every house bill. The declaration takes the containers allocated to this house bill in the shipment, and you can adjust the selection on the form.
Getting this right matters: filing the whole master's boxes under every house bill is accepted silently by the gateway and is wrong.
Choosing which containers this house bill carries
How it goes out
There is no draft-versus-live choice here, and that is not an omission. Whether your filings go straight to NACCS or are held for review first is arranged between your company and GeTS. Nothing in the declaration selects it, and it cannot be changed from this screen.
So the form simply tells you which applies to you:
Your arrangement | The form says | The button says |
|---|---|---|
Direct | Direct submit to NACCS — there is no draft step on this route | Submit to NACCS |
Held for review | Held for review before NACCS | Submit |
If that is not the arrangement you expect, it is a conversation with GeTS, not a setting here.
The AFR filing mode — stated, not chosen: GeTS decides it per company
What comes back
NACCS answers with a result code. Every code is decoded on the record with what it means and how to fix it, and the codes you will meet most are the party ones above — R0033, R0047, R0027, R0109.
NACCS also issues notices that are not rejections. Those appear on the record too, so a customs advisory does not read as a failure.
An AFR rejection decoded into plain English, with the field to fix under each NACCS code
If nothing comes back
An AFR that gets no answer within the polling window lands on No response — manual recheck needed. Use Check now on the record. If it stays silent, the filing is worth chasing with GeTS directly — a persistent silence usually means a credential or routing problem on the account rather than a problem with the declaration.
Gotchas
Reporter credentials are not portal credentials. A direct-submit account files under a NACCS reporter ID and password issued to your company. They are not the same as the login you use for the GeTS portal, and using the portal login produces a filing that appears to send and then fails. If every filing on a newly-switched account fails, this is the first thing to check.
Container size codes describe the box, not its capacity. The declaration reads the code from the container record.