Selling into Japan
The first-customer
problem in Japan
Nobody is against it, and nobody will move it.
The loop does not open by itself; it has to be cut somewhere.
Selling into Japan
Nobody is against it, and nobody will move it.
The loop does not open by itself; it has to be cut somewhere.
Japanese internal approval forms usually contain a field for precedent: comparable deployments, other customers, adoption within the same industry. The field exists, so it has to be filled, and a form with a blank in it does not circulate.
A new entrant has nothing to put there. What follows is a specific and very common deadlock.
"We need this. I want to bring it in."
Nobody wants to be the person who signed off on a foreign supplier first.
Nobody has objected, and nobody will proceed. The overseas vendor reads this as lack of interest and withdraws — usually one step short.
Japanese decision-making distributes responsibility across a chain of approvals rather than concentrating it in one person. The benefit of consensus is that a failure does not destroy an individual. The cost is that nobody can decide alone.
Inside that structure, an unprecedented choice can only take the form of someone personally accepting first responsibility — and there is no individual incentive to do that. Success is credited to the organisation; failure is recorded as one person's misjudgement.
This is not national caution. It is how the incentives are built. Install the same system anywhere else and you would get the same behaviour.
"200 deployments across Europe" is weak in a Japanese approval document. What the contact needs is not a count but one company whose conditions resemble the Japanese buyer's.
A mid-sized German component maker of comparable headcount, running the same process, with a known implementation timeline. If you can describe that one, it outperforms the two hundred. Comparability, not volume.
A purchase needs approval. A time-boxed evaluation sometimes does not — if the amount is small and the stated purpose is assessment, it can fall within a department head's discretion.
The point is not to discount. It is to change the shape of the risk: from a decision to buy into a decision to try. In exchange, write down the pass criteria before it starts. Without them, the evaluation ends in mutual satisfaction and nothing else.
A pilot with a municipality or public agency can substitute for a corporate first customer. "Used in a public deployment in Japan" is one of the few things that fills the precedent field.
But public work runs on a different clock: the budget line must exist before the fiscal year begins, and eligibility requirements are common. The proposal has to be timed to their budget cycle, not yours.
This is the part that makes the effort worth it. The first customer is disproportionately heavy; the second is disproportionately light. The moment the precedent field is filled, you become, for every other company in that industry, something already in use in their sector.
The entrance is the narrowest in the world.
The road on the other side is the widest.
The high retention rates people notice in Japan are the same asymmetry seen from the other end. Once you are in, replacing you means somebody else has to spend the years you just spent.
I run Kohomadha Inc. from Tokyo and hold a public appointment as an overseas business support representative for a Japanese prefectural government. Because the practice works on both directions of the same border — overseas companies coming into Japan, and Japanese producers going out — I see the same wall from both sides.
In practical terms: I have developed and delivered an operations tool for a logistics company in Brazil, worked on digital transformation with a major Japanese retailer, and supported market development for a Swedish energy business and for a government project in Africa. Client names are withheld. That is deliberate.
If you are trying to design your first Japanese customer
Tell me where the conversation is stuck now, and I will set out which of the three routes is realistic for your case and what it would take.