What is “CK”?
CK (Local public body or local government entity) is a nonprofit organization used primarily in Japan. It signals limited liability and private ownership.
Where it's used
CK appears in company names registered in the following jurisdiction:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to CK in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “CK” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme CK” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Acme CK", "country": "jp"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme ck",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"ck"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does CK mean?
CK means "Local public body or local government entity".
Is a CK public or private?
A CK is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a CK?
Owners of a CK have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use CK?
CK is used in Japan.
Need to normalize CK at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
Try the live normalizer free →