The part nobody puts on their website
Most shipments clear without incident. Some do not, and what happens next is fast, procedural and unforgiving. If you are going to trust someone with this, you should know how they behave on the bad days — so here is the honest version.
What can happen at the border
Every shipment gets one of these answers. Only the first is the one you want, and the distance between the second and the fourth is measured in days.
Reviewed and released. The goods move on to your buyer.
Nothing. This is the normal case.
Pulled for inspection or sampling before any decision is made.
Time and storage, both billed to the shipment. Not a rejection.
A formal notice is issued and a short response window opens.
Answer it properly and in time, or it becomes the next one.
Entry denied. The goods cannot be sold in the United States.
Export them back or destroy them. Both at your expense.
A detention is not a rejection — it is an invitation to respond, and it comes with a working-day deadline counted from the date printed on the notice, not from the day someone reads it. Miss that window and the detention becomes a refusal by default. There is no second letter.
The single most expensive thing that can happen here is a notice that sat in an inbox.
The failure that arrives before the shipment does
Some products and facilities sit on a published list that lets shipments be held on paperwork alone — no inspection, no sample, nobody opening a box. It attaches to the facility or to a country-and-product combination, not to any particular shipment, which means a perfect record protects you from nothing.
- It is published externally and revised without notice
- A clean shipping history does not mean you are not listed
- It is checkable before goods leave Japan — but only if someone checks
- We screen for it, and we re-screen, because a check from six months ago proves nothing
What we actually do about it
None of this makes a bad outcome impossible. What it does is make sure a bad outcome is noticed immediately and answered inside the window.
- Every outcome is recorded against the shipment the day the broker reports it
- A detention starts its response clock from the notice date, automatically
- The notice itself is filed with the shipment, so nothing depends on an inbox
- You hear from us on the bad days, not only the good ones
This is our job, not yours
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