Kohomadha Inc. — Tokyo · For referral and partner enquiries
Your partner in Japan
Japan is not entered by advertising into it. It is entered through a counterparty. We are the party on the Japanese side who finds that counterparty and stays until the contract is signed.
Naoya Takamatsu, Representative DirectorOverseas Business Support Representative, Tottori Prefecture
The problem
Why capable companies stall here
A company that sells well at home usually arrives in Japan with the product already right. What is missing is not marketing, and rarely translation. What is missing is the counterparty — the reseller, the integrator, the distributor, the buyer — and the person who can sit across from them.
Japanese buyers do not initiate. They very seldom approach a foreign supplier first, they will not evaluate a vendor they cannot reach in their own language and time zone, and they read a proposal from a company with no presence here as a company that may not be here next year. None of that is solved by a better deck.
The bottleneck is never the product. It is that nobody on the Japanese side is accountable for the deal.
What we do
One thing, carried end to end
We take a company into the Japanese market through a Japanese counterparty, and we remain responsible for the relationship after the introduction is made.
01
Define the counterparty
Not a list of plausible names. We agree the disqualifying criteria first, then screen honestly against them.
02
Reach them in Japanese
Approach, qualify, and get to a meeting that is worth holding. In person where it matters.
03
Sit in the room
We attend in both languages. Terms, objections and silences all get read correctly, by the same people throughout.
04
Stay through contracting
Negotiation, documentation, and the follow-through that decides whether a first order becomes a second one.
You deal directly with the people running the company. There is no account handler between you and the work.
Routes
How we reach the market
Almost nothing in Japan is sold cold. Our go-to-market is through the counterparty — and the route differs by what you sell. Each route below is described at its actual stage, not at its best.
Department store buyers
Operating. We take a European food brand to Japanese department store buyers ourselves — Takashimaya among them — acting as the brand's channel here rather than as an adviser to it.
Large retail groups
Operating. We are inside one of Japan's largest reuse retail groups on a digital transformation programme, at operational level.
Regional manufacturers
Operating. Food processing, seafood and precision manufacturing, particularly along the San'in coast and in Chubu. These firms do not answer cold approaches from overseas. They are reached in person, in Japanese.
Technical qualification
Operating. We qualify Japanese manufacturers against technical criteria on behalf of a European materials company — the screening step that precedes any supply relationship.
Resellers & systems integrators
Operating. Enterprise software is not bought directly in Japan. It is bought through the systems integrator a company already works with, who takes responsibility for making it run alongside everything else. Our team holds direct relationships into that layer, which is the difference between a foreign product being evaluated here and never being evaluated at all. We do not publish the names of integrators we work through.
Public sector
Operating. Tottori Prefecture, by formal appointment. Our Representative Director serves as Overseas Business Support Representative, which gives direct access to prefectural industry desks and the companies they support.
Fit
Who this works for — and who it does not
We would rather decline early than take an engagement that cannot succeed. Two honest filters:
Works
B2B. A product or platform already selling in its home market. A named person on your side who owns the Japan result and can answer questions within a working week.
Does not work
Consumer marketing plays. Pre-product companies. Anyone who needs Japan to produce revenue inside a quarter — the buying cycle here does not permit it.
We are equally engaged in the other direction: Japanese companies going out. If you are a partner outside Japan with clients wanting Southeast Asia, Europe or Latin America, that traffic runs both ways.
Connections
Rooms we are already in
A partner in Japan is only worth having for the doors they can open without an introduction. These are ours, described at their actual weight.
Public sector
Tottori Prefecture
Our Representative Director holds a formal appointment as Overseas Business Support Representative — a public position, listed on the prefecture's own site, advising companies on cross-border business. It is an appointment to advise, not a commercial endorsement, and we describe it that way.
What it gives access to
Prefectural industry desks and the companies they support; regional manufacturers along the San'in coast who do not answer approaches from overseas; and the municipal side of public procurement, including the regional revitalisation budgets that fund multi-site programmes.
Seniority of access
Where it matters, our approaches begin at representative-director level rather than with a purchasing department, and on the public side we work with the policy layer — elected officials and national government offices concerned with regional industry and overseas expansion — not only with administrative desks. We do not trade on names, and we do not offer influence. What this gives a foreign company is a hearing, early, from people who can actually decide.
Public award records
Japan publishes the companies awarded export and overseas-expansion subsidies, naming the firm and the project. We read these directly. It is the most reliable way to find Japanese companies that have just committed to going abroad — and, in the other direction, the ones actively building an import channel.
National trade bodies
JETRO and its Invest Japan Business Support Center handle incorporation, tax, labour and business matching. Most companies we work with use them, and should. We sit next to that, not in place of it.
Chambers of commerce & trade offices
In Tokyo
We approached the foreign chambers and national trade promotion offices in Tokyo directly, with one question: whether their members want someone on the Japanese side to carry the work rather than advise on it. Conversations are open with the Ukrainian, Canadian and Irish chambers. The Greek chamber introduced us onward to the commercial section of its embassy.
What they told us
Several answered plainly that this is not what their members ask for. We record that too — it is how we know where the demand actually sits, and a partner who only reports the encouraging half is not useful to you.
Commercial
Department stores
Buyers reached directly, Takashimaya among them, as the channel for a European food brand rather than as an adviser to one.
Large retail groups
Currently inside one of Japan's largest reuse retail groups on a digital transformation programme, at operational level.
Heavy industry
We hold an exclusive Japan mandate for a European marine energy technology company, and have taken them into Japan's major heavy-industry groups through introduction rather than approach. This is the tier that decides whether an energy or infrastructure technology gets built here, and it is not reachable by writing in. It is reached by someone vouching for you.
How that works
Introductions of that weight come from people, not from a database. Ours come through long-standing relationships held by our team and by the network around it. We do not name the intermediaries or the counterparties — the same discretion is what we would extend to you.
Outside Japan
Standing team members in Brazil and Europe; active engagements in Sweden, Spain, France, Portugal, Estonia and Lithuania; partner access in Africa and the Middle East. Japanese companies going out are handled by the same people, not a different desk.
Fuller detail, including engagements and their current status, is in the corporate profile. Our Japanese-language pages, including around fifty articles on the Japanese market, are on this site.
Why the door opens
Reaching the person who decides
In Japan the hard part is rarely getting a first meeting. It is getting from the person you meet to the person who can say yes. Proposals stall for months inside a company without ever being rejected.
Our Representative Director did not come from consulting. He worked as a television director, then as a producer in the advertising industry, before founding Kohomadha. Both are businesses in which nothing is delivered without reaching decision-makers directly, under a deadline, in Japanese — and the relationships built in those years sit across media, retail and the companies that advertise through them.
The practical effect is that an approach can often start higher than the procurement desk. That does not guarantee a yes. It does mean a no arrives in weeks rather than being absorbed silently for a quarter, which is worth almost as much.
It also means we read these industries from the inside. How a brand actually gets onto Japanese screens and shelves, who signs off and in what order, what a Japanese campaign costs and what it is really buying, and which parts of a proposal a Japanese counterparty will quietly ignore. For a consumer-facing product, that judgement decides the outcome more often than the market data does.
He also holds a public appointment from Tottori Prefecture as Overseas Business Support Representative, which is a separate route and a public one.
Working with partners
For advisers referring work into Japan
Much of what reaches us arrives through other firms — advisers, chambers of commerce and trade promotion offices whose clients ask for Japan and who have no one on this side to hand it to.
We work either as your subcontractor, delivering the Japan leg under your name, or as a direct counterparty to your client with a referral arrangement back to you. We have no preference between the two and will take whichever structure you already use.
What we will not do is take your client and keep them. If you introduce a company to us, the relationship remains yours to hold.
Kohomadha Inc. is a registered Japanese company based in Tokyo.