Fifty overseas companies announced a presence in Japan. We looked at each one the way a Japanese buyer would. This is what they find.
A Japanese buyer researching a supplier does one thing first. They search in Japanese. What they find in the next thirty seconds decides whether the company is considered at all.
We wanted to know what they actually find. So we took fifty overseas companies that had publicly announced a Japanese presence — incorporation, an office, a local hire — and checked each one from Japan, in Japanese.
The telephone figure was the result we did not expect. A company can have staff and a registered entity here and still leave a Japanese buyer with no way to pick up the phone. In Japanese procurement that absence is rarely read as an oversight. It is read as an answer.
Five companies had built a Japanese route into the site. The URL exists. The language switcher works. What loads is English.
From the buyer's side this reads worse than having no Japanese page at all. It looks like a promise that was made and then abandoned partway, which invites a question about everything else the company has committed to here.
The product was almost never the problem. What was missing was the evidence, in Japanese, that somebody is here.
Most of these fifty completed the first. The second was filed under marketing, deferred, and then not done. The gap between the two is where opportunities disappear without anyone noticing they were there.
A Japanese URL serving English, or a contact page carrying only a foreign number, is read as a statement about how seriously this market is taken. Finish it, or leave it off.
None of this requires a rebuild. It requires deciding that a Japanese buyer is a real audience, and then behaving as though they are.
Fifty overseas companies with a publicly announced Japanese presence were checked in August 2026, from Japan, in Japanese. For each we recorded whether a Japanese-language page existed, whether its content was genuinely Japanese rather than English served at a Japanese URL, and whether a telephone number was published.
This is a small survey, not a statistically representative study. The sample was drawn from public announcements of Japanese market entry and is weighted toward recent entrants, which likely overstates how unprepared the average established company is. We are publishing it because the direction of the result was consistent enough to be worth stating — not because fifty companies settle anything. The underlying list is available on request.