Why Japanese B2B still runs on the telephone

If you have been emailing Japanese companies and getting silence, there is a mechanical explanation that has nothing to do with your product, your pricing, or Japanese attitudes to foreign business. Your emails are arriving in an inbox that nobody owns.

The route that works for first contact with a Japanese company is frequently the one foreign companies have written off entirely: you telephone the main number and ask to be put through.

Why does email underperform for first contact in Japan?

Because the address you can find is almost always the one nobody is responsible for.

The contact address published on a Japanese corporate site is typically a general enquiry address — info@ or a web form. At a small or mid-sized company, that inbox is monitored by general affairs or an assistant whose instruction is to route genuine enquiries and discard sales approaches. An unsolicited proposal from an unknown foreign company, arriving in imperfect or translated Japanese, is indistinguishable from the sales approaches. It is not read and rejected. It is filed as noise.

The person who would actually be interested — a buyer in a specific department, a product manager, someone in overseas business — never sees it. Their address is not published, and there is usually no directory that would give it to you.

So you send a follow-up. It lands in the same inbox. You conclude the company is not interested. In fact the company has no idea you exist.

What happens when you telephone instead?

You reach a switchboard whose explicit job is to connect callers to departments — and that changes the interaction completely.

The main number of a Japanese company is answered by someone whose function is routing. That person is not a barrier in the way a screening receptionist is in some markets; connecting appropriate calls is the role. If you can say, in Japanese, who you are, what company you are from, and which department you need, you will often be put through.

Now you are speaking to a person in the relevant department. That conversation does two things an email cannot. It establishes that a real organisation with a real phone line is behind the approach. And it lets you ask the single most valuable question available to you: who should I send this to?

With a name and a department, your follow-up email is no longer cold. It is a message the recipient is expecting, referencing a conversation that happened. That email gets read.

Isn’t cold calling seen as rude?

Unsolicited sales calls are no more welcome in Japan than anywhere else. But the call we are describing is not a pitch, and the distinction matters.

The call that works is short and administrative. You identify your company, state briefly what the matter concerns, and ask to be connected to the right department — or, if that is not possible, ask who the enquiry should be addressed to. You are not attempting to sell on the phone. You are attempting to find the correct recipient, which is a reasonable request that the switchboard exists to handle.

What is genuinely poorly received is launching into a sales presentation, refusing to say which company you are from, or pressing after a clear refusal. Those behaviours are recognisable and they close doors. Asking politely to be routed does not.

Does this really still apply in 2026?

Less than it did, and more than foreign companies assume.

Large Japanese corporations, technology firms and anything with substantial export business are reachable by email much as their Western counterparts are. If you are approaching that kind of company, write to them.

The picture is different across the very large population of small and mid-sized Japanese manufacturers, wholesalers and regional distributors — which, for most product categories, is where your actual buyers are. Many of these firms run entirely conventional operations with a website that is essentially a brochure, and the telephone remains a primary channel. The fax machine has receded further than outsiders joke about, but the phone has not.

The practical consequence is that email-only outreach systematically filters your prospect list down to the segment that is easiest to reach — which is also the segment most likely to already have foreign suppliers.

What do you need to make the call work?

Four things, and the absence of any one of them tends to end the call early.

• Business-level Japanese. Not conversational. Switchboard exchanges use predictable set phrases, and an accent is not the problem — being unable to state your business in the expected form is.
• A company name that means something. “I’m calling from a company in Germany” is a weak opening. A registered Japanese company calling on behalf of a client is a materially different proposition.
• A specific department to ask for. “Whoever handles purchasing” works far less well than naming the department. This is why research precedes calling.
• A reason that survives one sentence. The person routing you will decide in seconds.

How does this fit with the fact that nobody decides alone?

The call gets you to the person who will carry the proposal internally. It does not get you a decision, and expecting one is the mistake.

Japanese companies typically approve things by internal circulation and consensus rather than individual authority. Your contact’s real task, if they are interested, is to convince colleagues. That means the call is a success when it produces a name, a department and permission to send information — not when it produces enthusiasm.

It also means the material you send afterwards should be built to be forwarded. Complete, specific, quiet in tone, and easy for someone to attach to an internal proposal without having to explain or defend it.

What about trade shows?

Same principle, different room. Japanese B2B still runs an active exhibition circuit, and for many categories it is where relationships genuinely start.

At a trade show the introduction problem disappears: exhibitors are there specifically to meet people, business cards are exchanged as a matter of course, and a conversation at a stand creates the “we have met” status that makes subsequent contact ordinary rather than cold. For a foreign company that cannot easily send someone to Tokyo three times a year, having a Japanese representative attend and collect the relevant cards is a cheap substitute for a great deal of unsuccessful emailing.

What does a realistic sequence look like?

Research first, then call, then write, then follow up. In that order.

1. Build a screened list. Companies that plausibly buy your category, with the right department identified for each. This is desk research and it is the part AI genuinely helps with.
2. Call the main number. Ask to be connected, or ask who the enquiry should be addressed to.
3. Send properly written Japanese material to the named person, referencing the call.
4. Follow up by telephone after roughly a week — not by second email.
5. Expect the timeline to be months. From first contact to a signed agreement, six to twelve months is normal. A quiet period does not mean rejection; it frequently means internal circulation.

When should you hand this over?

The moment you conclude that the constraint is reaching people rather than convincing them.

Steps two and four are the ones foreign companies cannot execute themselves, and they are the steps that make the difference between an email that is filed as noise and one that is expected. They require someone who can hold a business conversation in Japanese, in real time, with a company name behind them.

Our buyer and distributor discovery service includes the calling, not just the writing — we approach the main switchboard, ask to be routed, and follow up by telephone, then translate every reply back to you including the refusals. If you would rather keep the strategy in-house and simply need a Japanese-speaking person to make calls on your instructions, the Japan Desk assistant does that by the month. And if the answer is really a trade show, we can attend on your behalf and bring back the cards.