Scope
MHLW Notice No. 370 sets standards for foods, additives, apparatus, and containers and packaging. This page records Section III food-contact apparatus and packaging composition limits for lead and antimony.
Exact limit and units
| Metal | Matrix | Limit | Unit | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lead | Tin plating used on parts that contact food | 0.1 | percent by weight | tin-plating composition |
| Lead | Metals used to manufacture or repair food-contact parts | 0.1 | percent by weight | metal composition |
| Antimony | Metals used to manufacture or repair food-contact parts | 5 | percent by weight | metal composition |
| Lead | Solder used to manufacture or repair food-contact parts | 0.2 | percent by weight | solder composition |
How tested
The cited items are composition restrictions stated directly as percent by weight. The notice also contains migration and material-test provisions elsewhere; those are not converted here into species-specific product-content rows.
Enforcement posture
The Notice 370 provisions are statutory standards for food-contact apparatus and containers or packaging. Food-contact parts cannot be made or repaired using materials that exceed the stated lead or antimony composition thresholds.
History of changes
Notice No. 370 was originally issued on 28 December 1959. The local PDF states it reflects amendments through MHLW Notice No. 381 of 4 December 2020.
How it compares
Japan’s food-contact composition limits are close to the Korea MFDS food-contact metal limits for lead and antimony, but Japan separately states a 0.2 percent lead limit for solder. These are composition limits, not food contaminant limits.
Sources
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.
| Commit | Date | Change | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| a8052bb | 2026-08-09 | major | 1 source added; contamination-profile values revised; 7 sections added |