Insights
Notes on researching Japanese companies, writing to them, and getting a reply — including an honest account of what AI can do for you and where it stops.
17 September 2026 · 6 min read
The person who champions your proposal is usually not the person who approves it. How ringi and nemawashi work, which objections come from departments you never speak to, and how to write…
Distributor discovery
Read →10 September 2026 · 6 min read
Pairs of words that mean the same thing in English and are not interchangeable in Japanese — written versus spoken, humble versus neutral, person versus organisation. What each encodes, and why a…
Bilingual assistant
Read →3 September 2026 · 5 min read
Front kabu or rear kabu, traditional characters like 髙 and 﨑, kanji versus katakana, and four ways to romanise one surname. Why Japanese company names defeat string matching, and the one field…
Verification
Read →27 August 2026 · 6 min read
Your emails are arriving in an inbox nobody owns. The route that works for first contact with a Japanese company is the one foreign firms have written off: telephone the main number…
Distributor discovery
Read →27 August 2026 · 6 min read
The grammar was fine. That was never the problem. What gives a translated Japanese business email away — the written and spoken forms of "your company", the missing opening formula, the reversed…
Distributor discovery
Read →27 August 2026 · 6 min read
Japan keeps unusually complete corporate records, arranged in a way that defeats searching. What the free registry gives you, what the certificate of registered matters costs, why revenue figures are missing, and…
Verification
Read →27 August 2026 · 7 min read
AI will take you a long way into a Japan project and then stop at four specific boundaries: documents that are not on the web, actions that need a physical presence, language…
Japan Desk
Read →Start a request
You do not need a polished brief. A company name, a product, or a question is enough to get a scope and a price back.
Within one Japanese business day. Our hours are 09:00–18:00 JST, Monday to Friday — that is UTC+9, with no daylight saving.
708 Altair Akihabara Bldg., 1-8-4 Kanda-Sakumacho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0025, Japan
+81 3-6319-2800 — answered in Japanese first. Email is faster if you write in English.
We will sign your NDA before you send anything sensitive. Just say so in the message and we will send it back the same day.