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Abstract Collocations in Japanese and Korean have been studied extensively based on statistical tools. The criteria for collocations in these languages, however, have not been fully established in the literature, and it is not obvious whether all statistically significant combinations of words could be regarded as collocations. In this article, we point out empirical problems in extracting collocations in Japanese and Korean, and provide a standard for identifying collocations (to be separated from "free combination" and "idiom") in these languages. We concentrate on the discussion of empirical aspects of collocation research, rather than the statistical analyses of collocational patterns. As a preliminary to developing a database for Japanese-Korean contrastive work on collocations, the present study focuses on ten "Chinese-words" (漢語). We show that (i) the co-occurring verbs for eight Chinese-words in Korean all carry over to Japanese (but not vice versa); (ii) in the other two cases, Korean exhibits co-occurring verbs not found in Japanese; (iii) language-specific patterns of verb co-occurring are also observed in some instances. Overall, it is indicated that a much wider variety of co-occurring verbs are found in Japanese than in Korean.