Takamitsu Pharmaceutical sold 'Hugely popular on SNS!' — the posts were its own

Takamitsu Pharmaceutical, based in Kobe, sells Nobirun and Nobirun C, supplements marketed for children's growth. To promote them, it recruited third parties, gave them the products free, and asked them to post on SNS. Then it lifted images from those posts and published them on the products' official websites, its Rakuten Ichiba store pages and its Yahoo! Shopping pages — beside headlines like 'SNS demo dai-ninki!' ('Hugely popular on SNS!') and illustrations mimicking Instagram's icon. Nowhere did it say the posts had been requested.

That silence was the violation. Under Japan's stealth-marketing designation, in force since October 2023, a display must make clear when a business has requested it; the Consumer Affairs Agency's measure order of 29 June 2026 found that consumers could not tell these displays were the company's own. The Nobirun displays ran from April to December 2025, Nobirun C from October to December 2025. It was reported as only the third stealth-marketing measure order over health foods.

The order required Takamitsu Pharmaceutical to publicise the violation to consumers in a form approved in advance by the CAA, take recurrence-prevention measures, inform its executives and staff, and never run similar displays again — and to report on all of it in writing. The company published its formal notice and apology on 23 July 2026. The lesson travelled further than any fine: reposting user content is not free — if the business requested it, the business must say so.