Documents retention period to be extended in Japan

With the coming revision of the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law ("FEFTL"), the relevant Orders such as Foreign Exchange Order will be revised. On June 22, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry ("METI") announced draft version of relevant Orders in the web site to seek public comment. I have read through the draft Orders and found most of the revised points are reasonable to prevent unnecessary duplicated license authorization.

One point to noteworthy and applicable to all traders in Japan is that the export documents retention period will be extended from current 5 years to 7 years.
Let me explain the legal reason of it.

Under current FEFTL penal provision, the maximum penalty imprisonment is "not more than five years". This will be enforced to extend to "not more than ten years" for violation of WMD related case. The document retention period is based on the the statute of limitations under Code of Criminal Procedure Article 250. The statute of limitation is proportional to imprisonment term. Therefore, with the extension of imprisonment term, the statute of limitation is also extended. For imprisonment "not more than 10 years", the statute of limitation is 7 years and the company need to retain export related documents for 7 years accordingly.

With the revision of FEFTL, which increase the penalty, the document retention period affects almost all traders, they have to make change their internal operational rule, and some need to revise ICP accordingly. The revision of FEFTL is expected entry into force in end of this year or earlier next year.

(Source: http://www.cistec.or.jp/service/090227gaitamehoukaisei/090622point.pdf - Japanese only.)