Japanese Shaken & Export Certificate OCR

The Complexity of JDM Documentation

The global export of Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) vehicles relies heavily on official documentation like the Vehicle Inspection Certificate (車検証 - Shaken) and Export Certificates. For overseas buyers and logistics companies, manually transcribing data from these documents is costly and error-prone due to the dense mix of Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Furthermore, unlike standard 17-character international VINs, traditional JDM Chassis Numbers (車台番号) often feature variable lengths and embedded hyphens (e.g., JZX100-0123456). Standard OCR tools struggle to differentiate these unique alphanumeric strings from the surrounding Japanese script. To see how we solve these multi-layered data extraction challenges, explore our core OCR product capabilities.

Built for Global Auto Trade

StructOCR is engineered to power the international used car market. As a specialized module of our broader Automotive VIN OCR solution, this API is trained to recognize both standard 17-character VINs (for imported vehicles in Japan) and native JDM hyphenated chassis formats. The engine cleanly bypasses Japanese characters and official watermarks, delivering pure, actionable alphanumeric data.

Core Industry Applications

Integration & AI Prompts

Our lightweight REST API is designed for modern serverless architectures. It accepts image URLs, raw file uploads, or Base64-encoded strings without requiring heavy SDKs. Copy the prompt below into Cursor or v0 to generate a Cloudflare-optimized frontend.

import requests
import base64

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# 👉 https://structocr.com/register

# 1. Prepare Base64 Image (Supports raw files, Base64 strings, or URLs)
with open("jdm_export_certificate.jpg", "rb") as image_file:
    base64_image = base64.b64encode(image_file.read()).decode('utf-8')

url = "https://api.structocr.com/v1/vin"
headers = {
    "x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}
payload = {
    "img": base64_image
}

try:
    print("Scanning Japanese Shaken Document...")
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
    result = response.json()

    if result.get('success'):
        data = result['data']
        print("✅ Extraction Successful!")
        print(f"Chassis Number (車台番号): {data.get('vin')}")
        print(f"Confidence:              {data.get('confidence')}")
    else:
        print(f"❌ Extraction Failed: {result.get('error')} - {result.get('message')}")

except Exception as e:
    print(f"An error occurred: {e}")

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "vin": "JZX1000123456",
    "confidence": "High",
    "carrier_type": "document"
  }
}