The Japan department for manufacturers who cannot justify hiring one.
For technical B2B companies that already have a Japanese customer, an inquiry, or a distributor, and nobody on staff who works in Japanese. We work with clients across Europe, North America, and Australia.
Book a free 30-minute Japan reality check30 minutes, no cost, no obligation. If Japan is not realistic for you right now, we will say so on the call.
Fit
You sell consumer products. What we do is built around industrial buying, so it would need adjusting, but the Japan Desk works the same way whatever you sell. Tell us about your situation on the call and we will give you an honest answer either way.
You only need translation or localisation. We do that as well. See Japanese localization services.
欧州進出をお考えの日本企業の方へ。 ご支援は可能ですが、こちらのサービスとは 進め方が異なります。お問い合わせページから直接ご連絡ください。 日本語で承ります。
The situation
If none of the following sounds familiar, we are probably not a fit.
An inquiry arrives from Japan. You answer it carefully. They reply once. You answer again. Then the replies get slower and shorter, and then they stop.
The hard part is knowing what that means. In many Japanese companies the decision is not made by the person writing to you. It is assembled internally first and circulated for approval one desk at a time, which is why a decision that takes weeks elsewhere can take months here. While that is happening, the correspondence goes quiet in exactly the same way it goes quiet when you have been dropped. From the outside the two look identical, and they call for opposite responses.
Your Japanese counterpart brings three people to the call. The discussion you can follow is in English, and it is polite, and it is short. The discussion that settles anything happens in Japanese, either before you joined or after you leave.
This is not exclusion. English is hard work for most of the people in that room, and the person who understands your product best is often not the person whose English is best. So the technical detail that would have won the argument on your behalf never gets said.
Your technical documentation is complete by the standards of your home market. Japanese buyers keep asking for things it does not contain: lot-level test data, tolerances expressed differently, and evidence of how the product behaves at the edge of specification.
You lose a quote and assume you were too expensive. Sometimes that is true. Often the price was acceptable and something else disqualified you: a delivery commitment you hedged on, a certificate you could not produce quickly, an answer that arrived four days later than expected.
None of these are language problems, and none of them are fixed by translation.
Services
Fixed scope. Three to four weeks.
A written answer to the question of whether Japan is worth your time, and what you would do first. Five deliverables:
Ongoing. Minimum six months. Three levels.
Before the task list, the practical change is this: your company can name someone who handles Japan. Your Japanese counterpart has a person to write to in Japanese, who was in the previous meeting and is the same person next month. Companies in the middle of a live negotiation often reach us at exactly this point, when the work is already happening and there is still nobody who can be introduced as the Japan side of the business.
This is a working function, not a mandate. We represent your company in conversation and correspondence. We do not hold authority to commit you to anything. See what we do not do.
The work covers three areas:
How much of that you need is the only thing that changes between levels:
| What is included | Light | Standard | Full |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japanese correspondence and documents, written or reviewed | Included | Included | Included |
| Interpretation in your online meetings | Included | Included | Included |
| Written monthly summary of what happened and what it means | Included | Included | Included |
| Outbound contact with your Japanese customers, on your instruction | Not included | Included | Included |
| Meeting preparation and follow up | Not included | Included | Included |
| Management of the Japanese side of your pipeline | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Trade shows and customer visits in Japan | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Partner search: profiling, shortlisting, and Japanese-language outreach | Not included | Not included | Included |
Light is reactive: we handle what reaches you. Standard adds outbound work on your instruction. Full adds ownership of the Japanese side.
One thing to be clear about. Partner search is work, not a promised outcome. We can define the right type of partner, build and prioritise a shortlist, and approach them in Japanese. Whether any of them says yes is not something we or anyone else can guarantee.
Per project.
Events, delegations, and introductions on the ground in Japan, run with a Japanese execution partner.
Scope decides the fee, so it is quoted per engagement rather than listed here. We cover it on the call.
Process
You can stop after step one or step two. Neither obliges you to continue.
Book a free 30-minute Japan reality checkPeople
Founder, KAIZEN Digital OÜ · LinkedIn
Every engagement is led personally by Rie. You deal with the person doing the thinking rather than an account manager, and your file is not passed to a junior after the first meeting. Where a piece of work needs a specialist, whether that is a translator, a lawyer, or a partner on the ground in Japan, she brings one in and stays accountable for the result.
She is Japanese and works in Japanese and English, has lived and worked in seven countries, and is based in Europe, inside your business day. Your Japanese counterpart hears from someone who reads the room the way they do, and you hear back the same afternoon rather than the next one.
Her background comes in two halves that meet in this work. As a senior SEO content manager she has run on-site and off-site SEO as a full-stack specialist, taking responsibility for how a site performs as a whole rather than for one channel of it, and has worked on localisation and international localisation with global teams inside Fortune 500 companies. Brands she has worked with include Shopify, Swarovski, and Workday. Her Japanese writing is published under her own name on Shopify's Japanese business blog. That is the skill behind the part of the assessment that reads your English site and technical documents the way a Japanese buyer reads them.
The other half is PR and Japan desk work for foreign companies: sitting between the Japanese and non-Japanese sides of a conversation, moving negotiations and deals forward, and applying a working knowledge of how business is actually conducted in Japan rather than how it is described in a guidebook. She has worked in Japanese and English professionally since 2019 and holds a degree in business administration and a technical SEO certification.
Boundaries
These limits are deliberate. A consultant who claims all four is either overselling or exposing you.
Questions
If you can, do. A full-time hire who knows your product and works in Japanese is better than any outside arrangement, and we will tell you so on the call if that is the right answer for you.
The difficulty is supply. In JETRO's 2025 survey of foreign-affiliated companies in Japan, the two changes those companies most wanted were easier hiring of skilled staff and of general staff, ahead of everything else. One respondent, a machinery manufacturer, described the problem exactly: it is hard to find people who have both the English and the technical ability. Another noted that strong candidates are absorbed by large and higher-paying employers. The person you would be recruiting is the person everyone else is recruiting too.
For a first pass on an email, often yes, and we use those tools as well. What they do not do is decide what should be said. Most of this work is judgment: which of three true things to put first, when a direct answer will land badly and when hedging will cost you the order, and what a short reply from the other side actually means. That judgment is the product.
JETRO is a public organisation with excellent free material and a mandate to serve everyone, so it is broad by design and it does not work your pipeline. A trading company takes a position in your transaction, which means its interests and yours are related but not identical. We are neither: we run the Japanese side of your business as an extension of your own company, on a scope you set.
Alongside them, in most cases. A distributor sells. What a distributor generally does not do is run your side of the relationship: prepare your material in Japanese before the meeting, attend representing you rather than themselves, and tell you afterwards what was agreed and what was left unsaid. If your distributor is already doing all of that well, you may not need us, and we will say so.
Usually not at the beginning. Plenty of manufacturers sell into Japan for years through a distributor or direct export before there is a reason to incorporate. Setting up an entity early adds cost and administration without adding orders. When incorporation does become the right move, the specific structure is a question for a tax and legal specialist.
The call can usually happen within a week. An assessment takes three to four weeks from the point the scope is agreed. Japan Desk work starts at the beginning of a month.
The industries we work in most often are listed on the consulting services page. If yours is not there, raise it on the call.
Insights
If you would rather assess the thinking before booking a call, start here.
Bring one real situation: the inquiry that stalled, the meeting you could not follow, the quote you lost. You will leave the call with a view on whether Japan is realistic for you now, and what we would do first.
Book a free 30-minute Japan reality checkPrefer to write first? Send us a message.
KAIZEN Digital OÜ
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