Japanese business practice
Why Japan is slow,
and then suddenly fast
The delay is not caution.
Something other than the product is being checked.
Japanese business practice
The delay is not caution.
Something other than the product is being checked.
Overseas companies entering Japan tend to arrive at the same impression in the same order. You are welcomed. Meetings are granted. You are listened to carefully and your material is actually read.
And then nothing happens. Three months, six months. The contact remains courteous and the file does not advance. This is where most companies leave.
The product question was mostly settled in the first meeting. What is being established over the following months is how you will behave when something goes wrong.
Japanese commercial relationships are built on the assumption that a good deal of what happens will not be covered by the contract. Specifications change mid-project, delivery dates move, faults appear that nobody modelled. At that moment, a counterparty who reaches for the contract to establish the limits of its liability and a counterparty who starts by fixing the problem are treated as two entirely different kinds of company.
The time is not being spent on indecision. It is being spent gathering evidence on that one question.
Not the content — the latency. The ability to answer "I will check and come back to you by tomorrow" when you cannot answer properly yet changes how you are assessed.
In Japan, silence is read as a statement about priority. It is not read as a statement about how busy you are.
Reassigning account owners is routine in Western companies. Seen from the Japanese side, the relationship returns to zero — not because the explanation has to be repeated, but because what was accumulated was attached to an individual.
If it cannot be avoided, create a handover meeting. An email announcing the change is not sufficient.
This is the one that matters most. A date is at risk, a figure will be higher than quoted, something is not possible. Problems you raise first do not cost you trust; they generally earn it.
Problems discovered later can end the relationship regardless of how small they are, because the reading is that you concealed them.
Once you are through, the view changes. Introductions begin. Your contact brings in another department. You are referred to competitors of theirs. Price negotiation thins out and contract terms lengthen.
What used to take six months starts taking two weeks.
The narrowest anywhere. Costly in time and in money, with no way to shortcut the assessment.
The widest anywhere — and your competitors are held up at the same wall. Switching away from you means someone repeating the whole assessment.
Most withdrawals happen during exactly this assessment period, because from outside, a period with no traction and a period with no pulse look identical.
If I had to give one test, it is this: has the other side started naming people inside their own organisation? "I will raise it with my manager." "I would like another department to see this." Sentences like those mean the file is being moved internally.
Conversely, if months have passed and the conversation is still contained entirely within one person, it has not been taken inside. That is not the moment to give up. It is the moment to rebuild the proposal into something that is easier to carry inside — which is a different piece of work from following up.
If you cannot tell whether to wait or to act
Tell me how the exchange has gone so far. I will give you my read on whether you are inside the assessment period or whether the proposal needs to change shape.