Summary

  • On 5 August 2026, JPRS announced the 40th anniversary of .jp, tracing the delegation from Dr. Jon Postel to Dr. Jun Murai on 5 August 1986, the transfer of 261 JUNET domain names on 30 September 1989, and JPRS's own assumption of administration in April 2002 under a ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement with ICANN (anniversary announcement; Japanese version).
  • The JP Domain Name Registry Report 2025, published on 26 March 2026 and issued 25 March 2026, records 1,825,932 total registrations as of 1 January 2026, up 47,109 year on year; the report has been published annually since 2004 (report PDF; press release; publication notice).
  • On 23 January 2026 JPRS published a correction notice stating that the 1 January 2026 figures displayed on its website were erroneous, with error windows on 1–23 January 2026 (until 13:52) and on 26 January 2026 (09:00–10:20); the corrected values match the Registry Report 2025 and the current monthly table (correction notice; FROM JPRS vol.1230).
  • The live statistics snapshot as of 1 September 2026 records 1,890,104 total registrations, with general-use JP at 1,302,374 and Japanese-script general-use names at 79,253 — below the 80,551 recorded on 1 January 2026 (statistics; time-series table; Japanese table).

An anniversary and its number

The anniversary announcement is a compressed institutional history. It recounts that Jon Postel proposed the initial TLD set including ISO 3166-1-based country-code domains, and that on 5 August 1986 he delegated .jp to Dr. Jun Murai. In 1988, major Japanese academic networks agreed to delegate .jp to Murai and introduced the ac/ad/co/go/or attribute structure. Full-scale operation began in October 1989, when JUNET completed its transition to .jp; 261 domain names were transferred from JUNET on 30 September 1989. JNIC, founded in December 1991, was reorganized into JPNIC in April 1993. JPRS itself was established in December 2000 and took over .jp administration in April 2002 after a ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement with ICANN (anniversary announcement).

Against that forty-year arc, the announcement's one live statistic — approximately 1.88 million registrations as of 1 August 2026 — is a rounding of the 1,879,925 recorded in the monthly table for that date (time-series table). The claim is accurate to the rounding convention JPRS chose; the table makes the exact value checkable.

The record the anniversary stands on

The JP Domain Name Registry Report 2025, published on 26 March 2026, is the registry's own annual statistical account. Its headline: 1,825,932 total JP domain name registrations as of 1 January 2026, an increase of 47,109 over one year. General-use JP domain names (汎用JP) totalled 1,246,931, of which 80,551 were Japanese-script names and 1,166,380 ASCII. Prefecture-type JP domain names totalled 10,498, with 1,247 Japanese-script. Organizational/geographic-type JP domain names totalled 568,503, with CO.JP at 493,944. The report's multi-year series includes 1,756,107, 1,778,823 and 1,825,932 for the three most recent year-starts (report PDF). The press release confirms the publication date and adds that the report has been published annually since 2004, and that 2025 initiatives included extending the tentative registration period for AC.JP/ED.JP domain names (press release; notice).

The January correction

Between the report's snapshot date and its publication, one episode matters for how much weight the numbers can carry. On 23 January 2026, JPRS published a correction notice stating that the 1 January 2026 registration figures on its website were erroneous. The notice specifies two error windows: from 1 January 2026 to 13:52 on 23 January 2026, and again from 09:00 to 10:20 on 26 January 2026. The corrected values were republished in the FROM JPRS newsletter vol.1230 of 26 January 2026, marked with asterisks: total 1,825,932; general-use JP 1,246,931 (ASCII 1,166,380; Japanese 80,551); prefecture-type 10,498; organizational/geographic-type 568,503 with a full attribute breakdown (correction notice; newsletter).

Two observations follow. First, the corrected figures are the ones consistent with the Registry Report 2025 and the current monthly table, so the final record is coherent. Second, JPRS does not state in the retrieved notice what the erroneous values were; anyone who sampled the statistics page during the error window may carry incorrect figures. The correction notice is therefore both evidence of a functioning correction practice and a caveat on secondary citations of January 2026 data.

What the growth is made of

The live statistics page records 1,890,104 total registrations as of 1 September 2026: general-use JP 1,302,374 (ASCII 1,223,121; Japanese 79,253), prefecture-type 9,831, and organizational/geographic-type 577,899, with CO at 502,610 and OR at 42,364 (statistics). Between 1 January and 1 September 2026 the total grew by 64,172, roughly 3.5 percent, through monthly totals of 1,844,251 (April), 1,869,207 (July) and 1,879,925 (August) (time-series table).

The composition detail is the analytically interesting part: over the same period, Japanese-script general-use names fell from 80,551 to 79,253, a decline of 1,298. All of the net growth in 2026 so far is in ASCII and attribute-type categories, principally CO. A forty-year-old registry can grow while its original multilingual layer contracts; that fact is visible only because JPRS publishes the split, and it is a fact an aggregate total would conceal.

Caveats on the record

The PDF report's table text was retrieved in fragmentary form, so finer breakdowns beyond the headline figures are not quoted here. The statistics pages are undated snapshots; the 1 September 2026 as-of date is read from the table header. And the exact erroneous values originally displayed in January 2026 are not stated in the retrieved correction notice.