01·For people living in Japan who don’t read Japanese

Your Japanese mail, explained — and what to do about it.

Photograph any letter from city hall, the tax office, immigration, your bank or your landlord. Jozu translates it into plain English, tells you what it wants from you, and reminds you before the deadline.

  • 14 days, 3 documents free. No card.
  • Then ¥2,500/month. Cancel anytime.
  • Document text encrypted with a key unique to you.
令和8年10月6日品川区長
令和8年度
特別区民税・都民税 納税通知書
品川
区印
Tax
Residents’ Tax Payment Notice
From Shinagawa City Office
What it says

Your residents’ tax, based on last year’s income. A payment slip is enclosed for a bank, post office or convenience store.

What to do
Pay ¥48,600
Due
Jan 13
Alert saved. Email reminders on Jan 6 and Jan 12.
Can I pay this at a konbini?
Yes, if the slip has a barcode. Take it to a convenience store before Jan 13.
Example output

What Jozu does

Not just translated

A plain-English summary, what you need to do, and the amounts and dates, pulled out.

Deadlines, with reminders

Save a date as an alert and get an email before it’s due.

Every letter, filed

Sorted into Tax, Medical, Immigration, Housing and more. Searchable in English.

Private by design

Your documents’ text and translations are encrypted with a key unique to your account. Never sold, and never used to train AI.

02·The kind of paperwork Jozu reads

What Jozu tells you
about the letters in your mailbox.

Examples of letters that arrive in mailboxes across Japan every month, with what each one says and the date you need to know about.

ex. 01
特定健診のお知らせ
tokutei kenshin no oshirase
Medical
Specific Health Checkup Notification
A free annual checkup, paid for by the city. Includes a voucher for use at a designated clinic.
Register before the voucher expires
Jan 31
ex. 02
国民健康保険料納付通知書
kokumin kenkō hokenryō nōfu tsūchisho
Tax
National Health Insurance Premium Notice
Annual premium broken into four quarterly installments. Includes payment slips for konbini or bank.
First installment
Jul 31
ex. 03
在留資格更新申請のご案内
zairyū shikaku kōshin shinsei no goannai
Immigration
Residence Status Renewal Guidance
Reminder to begin the residence-card renewal process. Lists required documents and the application window.
Submit no later than
Mar 14
ex. 04
住民税納税通知書
jūminzei nōzei tsūchisho
Tax
Residents’ Tax Payment Notice
The city portion of last year’s income tax, split across four installments. Itemised by ward and prefecture.
First installment
Jun 30
03·How it works

From mailbox to understood.

01Photograph

Take a photo.

Whatever’s in your hand — a flyer from city hall, a notice from the post office, a letter you don’t recognise. Phone camera, scanner, screenshot: a photo, a PDF, or pasted text. The format doesn’t matter; the document does.

02Read

Jozu reads it.

Built for Japanese officialese — the formal turns of phrase that appear in tax notices, health-insurance forms, and immigration letters but nowhere else. You get a faithful, line-by-line English translation that keeps the document’s structure, and a short brief at the top: what it is, who sent it, and what it expects of you.

03Ask

Ask follow-ups.

Anything you didn’t understand — “Do I actually need to attend this?”, “What is a 住民税?”, “Can I pay this at the konbini?” — ask in either language. The answers are about your document, not generic web results.

04Keep

Keep on top of it.

Deadlines and amounts are pulled out to the top of the document. Save a deadline as an alert and Jozu emails you before it’s due (a week and a day ahead, by default), so it’s harder to miss. Every letter is filed under a category and searchable in English.

04·Privacy & security

Your tax letters are nobody else’s business.

The paperwork Jozu reads is some of the most personal you own: your address, your income, your residence status. Here’s how it’s kept that way.

Encryption

Encrypted with a key unique to you.

Before Jozu saves a document’s text, its translation, the details it pulled out, or an alert note, it encrypts them with AES-256-GCM using a key that belongs to your account alone. Someone reading our database directly sees those fields only as ciphertext. Documents saved before February 2026 may not have this extra encryption.

Storage

Files kept in private storage.

The photos and PDFs you upload are stored privately. Other users can’t reach them; only your account and Jozu’s own servers can read them.

In transit

Encrypted on the way, too.

Everything travels over HTTPS, and the providers we use encrypt stored data at rest.

Your data

Never sold. Never used to train AI.

We don’t sell your information and we don’t show ads. Your documents are not used to train AI models: Anthropic, whose AI reads them for Jozu, processes them under commercial terms that exclude training.

Sign-in

Optional two-factor sign-in.

Turn on two-factor sign-in in Settings and Jozu asks for a code from your authenticator app each time you sign in.

Alerts

An email when a new browser signs in.

If your account is signed into from a browser we haven’t seen before, we email you with the time and the type of browser, so you’d notice if it wasn’t you.

05·Pricing

One plan. Everything in it.

No tiers and no per-document fees. Try Jozu on your own letters first: the trial needs no card, and when it ends nothing is charged unless you choose to subscribe.

Jozu Pro

¥2,500/ month

The price you see is the price you pay. Nothing is added at checkout.

  • Unlimited documents
  • Line-by-line translation and a plain-English summary
  • Deadlines and amounts pulled out for you
  • Alerts with email reminders
  • Chat about every document
Free trial
14 days with 3 documents. No card needed.
Cancel anytime
From the Billing page. You keep access until the end of the month you’ve paid for.
Start your free trial
06·Questions

Before you ask.

Jozu - Understand Your Japanese Paperwork