Selling into Japan
Silence from a Japanese
company is not a refusal
Usually it means the person cannot yet explain you internally.
Four of the five kinds of silence can be restarted.
Selling into Japan
Usually it means the person cannot yet explain you internally.
Four of the five kinds of silence can be restarted.
The most frequent sentence in my inbox from overseas companies is some version of: the meeting went very well, and since then, nothing.
The observation that follows is usually "Japanese companies do not say no when they mean no." That is half right. They are not refusing — but the reason is less about manners than people assume. Often no decision to refuse has been taken either.
Treated as one thing, it is not actionable. In practice it separates into at least five.
The contact understands it. What they cannot assemble is the case to send upwards. With an unprecedented foreign product, the whole job of translating "why now, why this company" into internal language lands on them. Until that is done, there is nothing to reply with.
Restartable. Write the material for their internal audience and hand it over. This alone moves files.
It is in the chain. Five approvers at three working days each is three weeks. From the contact's point of view it is progressing, so there is no reason to report progress. Silence here is evidence of movement.
Restartable — but chasing stops it. Waiting is the correct action.
The Japanese fiscal year begins in April and budget lines must be established before it starts. A proposal that arrives in October was not rejected; it is roughly eighteen months early. The contact cannot say "not possible now", so they go quiet until the timing exists.
Restartable. Come back for the next budget-setting season. Most companies give up about three months before that.
Internal transfers every three to five years are normal in Japanese companies. The successor inherits the file but deprioritises externally originated proposals. Nobody has refused; the file is simply unowned.
Restartable — unless you had exactly one relationship inside the company.
This exists, and in my experience it is rarer than it feels. When it is the real answer, Japanese companies tend to send a short, excessively polite reply rather than nothing — an unobjectionable single sentence.
Not restartable. The value of recognising it is that you stop spending time here.
This phrase confuses overseas teams more than any other. It translates cleanly and means almost none of what it appears to mean. In practice it is nearly always one of two things:
"I think this is good, and I am not confident I can get it through internally."
"There is no budget now, and I cannot tell you when there will be."
Neither is a refusal. Neither improves by waiting, either. The person's difficulty is not your proposal — it is the mechanism for getting it approved.
"When you explain this internally,
which question is hardest to answer?"
This is the message I would send when a thread goes quiet. It has three properties: it does not accuse; it lets the person describe the real situation without becoming the obstacle; and the answer is a specification for the next document you need to write.
Ask "how is the evaluation progressing" and the only available answer is "it is progressing". The form of the question determines the quality of the information that comes back.
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 want to know which kind of silence you are in
Send me the history of the exchange and I will tell you which of the five it most likely is, and whether it can be restarted.