Doing Business Online in Japan: A Guide for English-Speaking Companies

We've spent years working on both sides of the UK–Japan business relationship. The number of English-speaking companies we've watched struggle with their Japan presence — by getting small things subtly wrong — is striking. This guide is the things we wish more people knew before they translated their homepage and called it done.

Japan is not just "Western internet in Japanese"

Online behaviour in Japan diverges from the UK/US in ways that matter for how you should design and structure your presence:

• LINE, not WhatsApp. LINE is the dominant messaging app, and a meaningful channel for customer service and bookings for local businesses. Most foreign companies don't have a LINE Official Account. They probably should.
• Search behaviour skews longer. Japanese searchers often type fuller phrases than English speakers do. Short, punchy English-style keywords don't always map across.
• Design aesthetics differ. A homepage that feels "clean and modern" in the UK can read as sparse and untrustworthy in Japan. A site that feels "too busy" in London may feel genuinely informative in Tokyo.
• Trust signals are weighted differently. Company registration details, physical address, year founded and director names carry more weight on a Japanese-facing site than they do on a UK one.

The bilingual site question

You have, broadly, three options:

1. Two completely separate sites. Best for businesses where the two audiences want materially different things. Most flexibility, most work.
2. One site with a language switcher. Best when both audiences want roughly the same information. Cheapest to build and maintain. This is what we usually recommend.
3. One site, English only, with a translated landing page. Rarely the right answer. Looks half-finished from either direction.

Whatever you choose, the translations need to be done by a native speaker who understands the business — not a generic translation agency, and not machine translation alone. Search engines now spot bad translation, and so do customers.

SEO in Japan: what actually moves the needle

• Target Japanese keywords, not translated English keywords. Search behaviour is genuinely different. A keyword tool that supports Japanese (Ahrefs, Semrush, Google's keyword planner in JP mode) is non-negotiable.
• Use proper hreflang tags linking your English and Japanese pages. Get this wrong and Google serves the wrong version to the wrong country.
• Get a .jp domain or .co.jp domain if you can. .com still works, but .jp is a stronger trust and ranking signal for the Japanese market.
• Use Yahoo! Japan analytics too. Yahoo! Japan still has meaningful market share and behaves slightly differently from Google.

The things foreign businesses commonly get wrong

• Treating Japan as a single market when Tokyo, Osaka and rural Japan are different audiences.
• Translating marketing copy verbatim, including idioms that don't translate.
• No phone number prominently displayed — a bigger trust hit in Japan than in the UK.
• Forms that ask for furigana (the reading of kanji names) only on the English-facing site, or ask the wrong way round.
• No LINE option for customer contact.
• Sending automated email from a foreign domain — much higher chance of being filtered into spam for Japanese providers.

A practical setup we'd recommend for most

1. One site with EN/JP language switcher, hreflang done properly.
2. A real address in Japan, even if it's a service address.
3. A Japanese phone number that actually rings somewhere useful.
4. A LINE Official Account linked from the contact page.
5. A Google Business Profile in both languages.
6. Native-quality translations done once properly, not in Google Translate.

Useful related reading

Two related pieces in this series go into specifics: Why your Japanese business needs an English website and LINE or website? How Japanese customers actually find local businesses. If you're ready to talk about your own setup, our contact page has both English and Japanese routes.