Japan begins weekly container throughput reporting for six major ports

# What changed Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) launched a weekly Container Cargo Flow Weekly Report on 18 September. The report uses data collected through Cyber Port, the government's digital platform for port logistics and administrative procedures, to provide a higher-frequency view of international container movements through six major gateways.

# Which ports are covered The weekly series covers Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. MLIT also aggregates volumes across those six ports to give a national-level indicator of container flow changes through Japan's principal container hubs.

# What the report shows Each weekly release reports foreign-trade container volumes on a TEU basis, broken into exports, imports and total container throughput. For every port and the six-port aggregate, MLIT provides simple comparisons: week-on-week, versus the corresponding week of the previous month, and versus the same week a year earlier.

# Timing and cadence A reporting period generally covers Monday through Sunday. Results are scheduled for publication by the Friday of the second following week, so users should expect roughly a 10–18 day lag between the end of the reporting week and public release.

# Data source and cautions

# Why this matters for users

# Practical implications

• Operational planning: Terminals and carriers can use earlier visibility to adjust labour, equipment and berth plans when volumes swing.
• Trade monitoring: Importers and exporters can track near-real-time shifts in inbound and outbound container volumes that may affect lead times and inventory decisions.
• Policy use: MLIT intends the series to support faster, data-based port policy decisions by identifying developments in port logistics sooner than conventional statistics allow.

# How to use the series responsibly Treat the weekly numbers as a high-frequency indicator rather than definitive final statistics. Watch week-on-week and year-on-year comparisons together to reduce noise. Expect revisions as MLIT updates preliminary Cyber Port figures and reconcile differences with the Port Survey where necessary.

# Bottom line Report adds a faster public signal of container trade through six of Japan's biggest ports. Its value lies in earlier detection of changes in flows, while the caveat is that figures are preliminary, include empties and may be revised later.