At the Extraordinary EAN International General Assembly meeting held in September 2003, EAN International (now GS1) decided to establish EPCglobal Inc. to standardize a new global system combining RFID and Internet technologies. It is called the EPCglobal Network System. In response to this initiative, EPCglobal Japan was set up within Distribution Systems Research Institute (DSRI) in January 2004 and has been operating since then.

CThe role of EPCglobal Japan includes promotion of company subscriptions to EPCglobal, allocating EPC Manager Numbers and registering them in the central database, authorizing network access, assisting introduction of the system, providing information, training and member support.
EPCglobal Japan conducts various activities in close liaison with its head office, EPCglobal Inc.

As of June 15, 2007, 46 companies are subscribing to EPCglobal, out of which 30 companies are end users, 15 companies are solution partners and the latest one is a trade association.
EPCglobal Japan participates in various EPCglobal meetings such as IAG, JRG, HAG and SAG. In October 2006, EPCglobal Board of Governors meeting was held in Tokyo. The Board of Governors also exchanged information with the Japanese subscribers and visited a department store to see how the RFID tag is utilized on the ladies' shoes.
In terms of its domestic activities, EPCglobal Japan holds various seminars aiming at promotion of the EPCglobal Network System and providing information on the system. At the Retail Tech Japan (Asia's largest retail IT and supply chain event) and other seminars held in 2007, EPCglobal Japan delivered lectures as a part of information provision activities.
As subscriber support, a meeting for provision of information and exchange of opinions is held for subscriber companies at regular intervals to reflect their voices to EPCglobal.

Starting in 2002, companies in Japan's consumer electronics industry conducted pilots for three years in which they attached RFID tags to consumer electronic products and packages. The pilots also verified that RFID tags can be actually operated and utilized by several companies in a single supply chain. In October 2005, based on the results of this 3-year survey and research, Japan RFID Consortium for Consumer Electronics products (JRCCE) was founded by four manufacturers, Hitachi, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Sony, and Toshiba.
JRCCE thinks that each company should be blessed with the merit by using RFID. And they have proposed the model that manages entire product lifecycle from manufacturing, physical distribution, retailing, maintenance, recycling to disposal.
For the RFID based Life Cycle Management in Consumer Electronics Industry, JRCEE created the use case model and the guideline. JRCEE is promoting this model and guideline to some international standardization organizations.
To strengthen the competitiveness of the Japanese consumer electronics industry, JRCCE have been feeding the results of the studies on international standardization back to domestic manufacturers, logistics companies, consumer electronics retailers, system vendors, tag vendors and other concerned parties.

The objectives of JRCCE are as follows:

1. To establish the guideline for adoption of RFID in use cases of the CE industry in accordance with the Lifecycle Management Model by our scope
2. To propose the international standards of tags, labels, interfaces, and applications to the global standard organizations, such as EPCglobal and/or International Standard Organization (ISO)
3. To ask related players, including parts vendors, distributors, retailers, and recycle companies, to adopt the Lifecycle Management Model JRCCE proposes

EPCglobal needed to create a setting within the consumer electronics industry to discuss and propose international standardization, which became the Consumer Electronics Industry Action Group (CE-IAG) later on. To promote the foundation of IAG, the first Consumer Electronics Discussion Group (CEDG) meeting was held in Tokyo in October 2006. The second meeting was held in Korea in December 2006, and the third meeting in Austria in May 2007. At these meetings, JRCCE explained the need for product lifecycle management using RFID tags.

As the result of these meetings, EPCglobal formally announced the foundation of CE-IAG at the Joint Action Group (JAG) meeting held in Paris in June 2007, which became the start of full-fledged standardization activities. Because consumer electronics products would have a long lifecycle, CE-IAG plans to review about after-sales services (repairs and maintenance) and product recycling.
EPCglobal Japan supports and cooperates with JRCCE and their activities.

A number of Japanese companies are actively contributing to the standardization efforts by EPCglobal's Transportation & Logistics Services Industry Action Group (TLS IAG). For instance, Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK)/MTI and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) have been co-chairing working groups since the group's foundation in November 2005. NYK/MTI was also appointed cochair of the entire IAG in 2006. Furthermore, several Japanese software vendors and tag suppliers have been supporting IAG's standardization activities in global pilot. Participants from Japan are leading these standardization efforts.

TLS IAG is now studying the utilization of EPC/RFID and business use-case studies with a view to improving the efficiency of international transportation. These studies are conducted by three working groups - Transportation, 4Walls, and Import/Export - all of which have so far collected use-case studies in each assigned area.
Also being examined is RFID tagging in shipping conveyance such as marine shipping containers and air cargo containers. Because such containers are made of steel and used in the rough-handled environments of huge container yards, RFID tags must be capable of long-distance transmission. For this reason, the use of active tags is generating considerable anticipation. Technical studies on RFID conveyance tagging have started to determine user requirements, and compiled as CAT (Conveyance Asset Tags) and XCATs (Extended-CATs). Detailed technical specifications are being examined based on these works.
In the area of imports and exports, concerned parties have shown great interest in streamlining procedures and ensuring import and export security as part of the recent worldwide measures against terrorism. They are studying how to link each country's import-export declaration systems (e.g., EDI) with the EPCglobal Network System and what possible advantages such linkage could bring to importers, exporters, and customs organizations. EPC Information Services (EPCIS) are also expected to be useful for visualizing the global movements of containers for security purposes.

TLS IAG is currently conducting the Global Pilot to examine whether user requirements will reflect the actual operations in the transportation and logistics industry. They are attempting to compile user requirements while feeding back the pilot results to the industry.
In the first phase of the pilot, sea transportation from Hong Kong to Japan was carried out in February 2007 with the support of METI, and interoperability with EPCIS and the use of active tags were also examined. A number of Japanese solution providers also participated in this first phase pilot, and Japanese software vendors offered their own EPCIS and confirmed the interoperability of each service with the EPCIS provided by the Hong Kong operators.
The second phase of the pilot is scheduled from November 2007 to February 2008 and it will test sea and air transportation from Shanghai, China to Los Angeles, USA. In this second phase, participants plan to examine how to streamline import and export procedures, ensure security, and verify the specifications of tags (CAT, XCAT) required for containers.