Aim:The Japan Atherosclerosis Society (JAS) Guidelines for Diagnosis and Prevention of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Diseases for Japanese 2012 version have set a non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (non-HDL-C)-management target of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) 30 mg/ dL. However, the actual difference between non-HDL-C and LDL-C is not clear. Therefore, we evaluated its joint distribution and assessed the validity of this criterion in the general Japanese population. Methods: We used baseline cross-sectional data of 4,110 participants from two studies; the KOBE Study (n 1,108) and the Tsuruoka Metabolomic Cohort Study (n 3,002). To evaluate whether the difference between LDL-C and non-HDL-C in the general population match that of the current guidelines, we classified LDL-C levels into four groups according to the JAS Guideline and evaluated its agreement with the corresponding non-HDL-C group. Analysis was also done using six groups (the previous four groups plus the upper and lower cut-off values). Results: The mean difference (mg/dL) between the non-HDL-C and LDL-C (for the KOBE Study and Tsuruoka Metabolomic Cohort Study, respectively) was 19.6 and 24.1 (p 0.001) for men and 15.9 and 18.3 (p 0.001) for women. In both the cohort studies, the difference was lower than 30 mg/dL. It was especially small among individuals with normal triglyceride levels. Conclusions: In the general Japanese population, the difference between non-HDL-C and LDL-C was lower than the expected difference of 30 mg/dL. Changes to the criteria for non-HDL-C target levels may be considered in the future.