Believed to be native to eastern Asia, it has been carried with the trade in cultivated maples and is now widely found in Europe, North America and Australia.

In the resting position three narrow beaded bands of purplish brown run more or less straight across the wings, incorporating some portions of the veins.

[1] This was confirmed in 1931 when P. W. Oman identified Platymetopius hyalinus with P. cinctus, described by Shōnen Matsumura in 1914 and found in Hokkaido, Honshu and Kyushu.

[5][6] In 1931 Elmer Darwin Ball designated P. hyalinus as the type (and, at the time, only) species of a newly differentiated genus Japananus.

[4] The first European records, from Austria and Romania, were published in 1961, followed by reports from Germany, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (1987), Bulgaria and Hungary (1989), France, Spain and northern Italy (1994), Slovenia (2002), Serbia and southern Russia (2003), Luxembourg (2010) and Poland (2012).