🇯🇵How does Japan mark Shopping Festivals?

ブラックフライデー

Local date

November 27, 2026

When is it?

Late November; each retailer announces its own window, most of them aligned with the Friday after American Thanksgiving.

Japan's Black Friday was imported by the retail trade. It has no legal standing and no official date: each chain announces its own window in late November, and the windows differ in length. Price claims fall under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. The guidance titled "Views on unfair price representations under the Act" was issued by the Fair Trade Commission on 30 June 2000, revised on 5 December 2002 and 4 January 2006, and taken over by the Consumer Affairs Agency on 1 April 2016. It allows a past price to serve as the comparison price only where the same item was sold at that price "over a substantial recent period" — a period that need not be continuous, since intermittent sales are assessed as a whole, and where "sold" means offered in the ordinary course of business, with no requirement that anyone actually bought it. On 25 December 2020 the Consumer Affairs Agency added an enforcement policy for the other form: the "cheap now, back up to X next week" comparison against a future price. Returns work quite differently here. Mail order has no cooling-off period; under Article 15-3 of the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions a buyer may withdraw within eight days of delivery, but only where the seller displayed no return policy of its own — where it did, the seller's terms govern, and return postage falls on the consumer. The law's move is instead to make the return terms an item that advertising may not omit, and for internet orders it must appear again on the final confirmation screen. Eight days in Japan is a default the seller may contract out of.