Your next customer does not read Japanese

Two government releases, read together, describe the Japanese market better than any consultant's deck.

The Immigration Services Agency counted 3,768,977 foreign residents at the end of 2024. That is a record, and it is 357,985 more than a year earlier, a 10.5% rise. The three largest groups are Chinese nationals at 873,286, Vietnamese at 634,361 and South Koreans at 409,238.

The Statistics Bureau's population estimate for 1 October 2024 puts the Japanese national population at 120,296,000, down 898,000 in a year. The foreign population rose by 342,000, a net inflow for the third year running.

One line goes down by close to a million. The other goes up by a third of a million. Those are not the same customers.

What "we handle Japanese customers" now means

Most companies in Japan we talk to describe their customers as Japanese. It is true in the sense that the customers are in Japan. It is increasingly untrue in the sense that matters for a product: the language they read, the payment methods they hold, the names their forms accept, the ID documents they carry.

The gap shows up in small places. A registration form that rejects a name without a kanji field. A support line that is Japanese only, weekdays nine to five. An app whose English is a machine translation nobody checked. A hotel booking flow that assumes a Japanese mobile number.

None of those are strategy problems. They are design problems, and every one of them costs a customer at the exact moment the customer was ready to pay.

The other reader

There is a second reader you do not see. When a foreign resident or an overseas buyer looks for a service in Japan, the search often starts in an AI assistant, in their own language. The assistant reads your site and answers on your behalf.

If the site is Japanese only, image heavy, and has no structured data, the assistant has little to work with, and the safe assumption is that it recommends someone it can read. We rebuilt a film studio's English site around exactly this problem this year. The Toei Studios case study has the before and after measured: page load on a phone from 12.8 seconds to 0.5, and about a thousand words of English where there had been ninety.

What to do first

Do not start with a full translation. Start with the three moments where money changes hands or a person gives up: the first screen, the form, and the confirmation. Make those work for someone who cannot read Japanese, then measure whether the number of completions by non Japanese readers goes up.

We run this as a two week diagnosis. It ends with a ranked list of what to fix, with the three moments above tested by someone who does not read Japanese.

The number to remember

Japan is shrinking, but not evenly. The Japanese national population fell in the year to October 2024. The foreign resident population grew 10.5% in 2024. If you want to know how your own first screen, form and confirmation hold up for that second group, send us the URL.