For buyers sourcing from Japan
Working with Japanese suppliers
without an office in Japan
You do not need an entity, or staff, or Japanese.
You do need to know which three things cannot be done by email.
For buyers sourcing from Japan
You do not need an entity, or staff, or Japanese.
You do need to know which three things cannot be done by email.
Buyers who want Japanese products often assume the barrier is structural — that you need a local company, a local employee, or at minimum a Japanese-speaking staff member before a small producer will deal with you seriously. For most of a sourcing relationship, that is not true. But a few specific parts of it do behave differently, and knowing which ones saves months.
The first approach. Written English is fine. Many small Japanese producers cannot hold a conversation in English but read it reasonably, and translation tools handle the rest. What stops a first email is almost never the language; it is a question they cannot answer, which is a separate problem.
Specifications and samples. Sizes, packaging formats, label content, sample shipments — all of this travels well in writing, and writing is in fact preferred, because it leaves a record both sides can check. A written spec sheet with numbers in it will get further than a call.
Price, once the question is answerable. An ex-works price in yen for a named quantity and a named month is a straightforward request and usually comes back within days.
First, being decided on. A small Japanese producer selling abroad for the first time is not primarily assessing your margin. They are assessing whether their product will be handled properly by someone they have never met, in a market they cannot see. That judgement is rarely made from a document. It is made from continuity — the same named person, writing again, remembering what was said last time. This is why a new email address every three months from a different colleague resets the relationship to zero.
Second, anything requiring a decision from more than one person. Exclusivity, a change to how the product is made, use of the brand name in your market: these involve people who are not on the email thread, and often not in the same room either. The reply you get will be slow, and its slowness carries no information about the answer. If your timeline assumes a two-week turnaround on this class of question, the timeline is wrong.
Third, the first serious visit. Not to negotiate — to be seen. Once, at the site, in person. It changes the register of everything afterwards, and it does not need to be long.
Import of record status, domestic distribution, and the ability to hold stock locally. Real advantages — but they matter after you have a product and terms, not before. Setting one up first is a common and expensive inversion.
One consistent point of contact on your side, one named product, and someone who can make a phone call in Japanese when an email thread stops moving. That last item is usually the whole gap.
The obstacle is rarely the absence of an office.
It is the absence of anyone who can ask why the thread went quiet.
Silence from a Japanese supplier is read by overseas buyers as a soft no. It usually is not. In the cases I see, it is one of a small number of ordinary things: the person who must approve is away; the question touched something the producer cannot answer without checking with a third party; the volume is outside what they can do and they are working out how to say so; or the email sat behind a seasonal production peak in which nobody answered anything.
None of these resolve themselves. All of them resolve in one phone call, because the phone allows the honest answer — "we cannot do that quantity" — that is uncomfortable to put in writing. A no delivered by phone in week two is worth more than a maybe that expires in month five.
I am a Japanese company, based in Japan, working with small and mid-sized producers on overseas sales, and appointed by Tottori Prefecture as an Overseas Business Support Representative. I am not a trading house and I do not take title to goods.
For an overseas buyer, what I can do is the part above that you cannot do from outside: talk to the producer in Japanese, find out what is actually blocking the answer, tell you plainly when the answer is no, and put the terms both sides have agreed into one document in both languages. If the honest conclusion is that a particular producer cannot serve your volume, you will hear that from me rather than discovering it in month six.
Have a stalled thread with a Japanese supplier?
Send me the product, the volume you need and roughly where the conversation stopped. I will tell you what is likely happening on the Japanese side, and whether it is worth continuing.