Japan Readiness Audits
Japanese buyers do not complain. They do not email to ask why the price is unclear or whether they can pay by invoice. They simply close the tab, and you never learn why.
Independent · bilingual · fixed fee · every finding sourced to a Japanese government page
What we check
Layer one, any bilingual colleague notices. Layer six needs an accountant — which is why almost nobody checks it, and why it is where the money usually is.
Literal-translation tells. Politeness level drifting between pages. Consumer warmth on a page an enterprise buyer is reading. The judgment here is wrong versus merely different — Japanese permits enormous range, and flagging legitimate style as error is how an audit loses its credibility.
Double-byte characters overflowing buttons and nav items sized for English. Line breaks that split compounds. Lines starting with 。or 」, which no Japanese typesetter would allow. CJK falling back to a substitute face.
One "Full Name" field where 姓 / 名 is expected. No furigana. Validation firing mid-composition, before the Japanese input method commits. Postal-code fields that don't autofill an address, which Japanese users expect.
No 会社概要. No named representative — anonymity reads as untrustworthy in Japan, not modern. "Japanese support available" resolving to English help docs on US business hours. Not one Japanese customer named anywhere.
An aggressive self-serve funnel for something Japanese firms buy consultatively, after a proposal, through 稟議 consensus. No stated response time — Japanese buyers read silence as disinterest.
特定商取引法 disclosure. 総額表示 — whether a buyer can tell if they pay ¥1,000 or ¥1,100. The qualified invoice system, and whether your T-number reaches the invoice your customer actually files. 個人情報保護法 disclosure. And whether a Japanese buyer whose finance department will not put a foreign vendor on a corporate card has any route to buy from you at all.
A localization consultant reads the website. An accountant reads the invoice the website generates.What layer six finds
A European software company selling direct to Japanese customers. Their Japanese copy is excellent — genuinely native, professionally written. So this is not a translation problem.
Observation · verified against the National Tax Agency registry
They hold an active Japanese qualified-invoice registration. The number appears nowhere on their site.
The registration is real — a number in the form T + 13 digits, active since October 2023, confirmed on the NTA's public registry. But it was not located on their imprint, their terms, their cart, any shop page, or their order-guide help article.
The National Tax Agency lists the registration number among the items a qualified invoice carries. So a Japanese finance team looking for it on the document they file has somewhere to look — and on the pages we checked, nothing to find. What that means for any particular buyer is a question for their 税理士, and the report says so rather than answering it.
We could not obtain the receipt itself, and the report says that too, in the finding. That is the honest shape of this work: a company is paying to be registered, and the number is not where a buyer would look. No localization agency produces that finding, because it means checking a public tax registry against a receipt rather than reading the website.
Free · no email required · about ten minutes
Three checks you can run on your own site right now. Open your Japanese pages in another tab and answer honestly — nothing here is sent anywhere, and there is no form to fill in.
Check 1 · Required disclosure
Go to the footer of your Japanese homepage and your pricing or shop page. Look for a link with that exact phrase — or 特商法に基づく表記. Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency requires ten specific items in mail-order advertising, and this is the page they live on. It applies to foreign companies selling to Japanese consumers too.
Check 2 · Price display
Look at any price on your Japanese pages. Is there a 税込 or 税抜 label right next to it? And is the number a deliberate Japanese price — ¥11,800 — or an unrounded conversion like ¥11,999 with no comma?
Check 3 · Qualified invoice
Search your checkout, your invoices, your receipts and your disclosure page for a number in the form T followed by thirteen digits. Not whether you're registered — whether the number appears on the document your Japanese customer files. Those are different questions. The National Tax Agency lists the number among the items a qualified invoice carries — what follows for a particular buyer is a question for a 税理士, and it is one we would route rather than answer.
Pricing
Machine translation has collapsed the price of words. What remains worth paying for is judgment, and judgment is priced against an outcome, not a word count. Every engagement is a fixed fee agreed before work starts.
Start small
The full audit
Afterwards, if you want it
Quoted from the findings, never before them — the audit is the scoping document, and quoting blind would mean guessing. A single-surface rewrite runs $1,800–$4,000; a full site rewrite to $12,000. Work on a legal page is different: your lawyer decides what it must contain and instructs us in writing, we produce the Japanese and implement it, and they approve it before it goes live. From $900, and it starts when they've instructed — not before.
Ninety days on, same rubric, same scoring, so the movement is visible. Offered at delivery as a fact rather than a pitch.
For audit clients whose sites keep publishing in Japanese — a help centre, release notes, documentation. Up to eight new or changed pages a month, sent by you: each one checked against your audit's glossary, with a flag when a compliance page goes stale against its source. Month to month, 30 days' notice. It is not a substitute for an audit; it keeps one from going out of date.
For companies where nobody owns Japan internally. Not a bigger review package — accountability for the outcome, a seat in your planning, competitive monitoring, a quarterly re-audit, and the calls made rather than the options listed. Six-month minimum.
None of these is a condition of anything else, and plenty of clients take the report and do the work themselves. That is a perfectly good outcome.
What this is, and is not
This matters to how the report reads, so it is worth stating plainly rather than burying in terms.
Every compliance finding says what was located, not located, or what a repeatable check returned — with the URL and the date. You can verify any of it yourself.
The Japan Bridge is not a law firm, a 弁護士 or a 税理士. We report what the agency publishes and what we found on your site. Whether a rule applies to you is a question for Japanese counsel or a 税理士, and the report says which one.
We do not certify compliance and cannot make anyone compliant. Acting on every finding does not establish compliance with anything. What the audit does is show you what is there and what is missing, with the evidence.
Every rule cited links to the Japanese government page it comes from — 消費者庁, 国税庁, 個人情報保護委員会 — read in Japanese, with the date it was checked. Japanese rules move; the report says when it was true.