Reach Japanese Companies Without Hiring in Japan

The problem

Outbound into Japan usually stalls before it starts

Not because Japanese companies don't buy from foreign vendors. Because the channel most teams reach for first doesn't work there, and the one that does is hard to operate from outside the country.

Cold email runs into an opt-in law

Japan's Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail requires prior consent, with a narrow exception for organisations that publish their own email address. In our own survey of 892,468 Japanese companies, only 32.1% published an email address at all. For the rest, there is no address to write to and no exception to rely on.

Our database, surveyed set of 892,468 companies, as of 7 Oct 2026.

The lists aren't in English, and they go stale

Japan's corporate registry, industry portals and company databases are Japanese-only. A scraped file is a snapshot: companies close, sites move, forms get replaced. Buying a list once and mailing it for a year is the most common way this channel fails.

Translated copy reads like translated copy

A Japanese manager can tell from the first line. The level of formality, how you handle the company's name, how you ask for a meeting, what you leave out — these are conventions, not vocabulary. Translating an email that works in English produces something that is grammatically fine and commercially dead.

Replies come back in Japanese

If nobody on your side reads Japanese, the channel stops at the first reply. Most teams discover this after the sends have already gone out.

The channel

The front door Japanese B2B actually uses

Japanese companies put a contact form on their website and treat it as the entrance for everyone they don't already know — suppliers, partners and vendors alike. Domestic sales teams use it heavily enough that it has its own name: form eigyo (フォーム営業), literally "form sales."

It is not a workaround for email being hard. It is where an unknown company is expected to knock. That is also why it is unforgiving: the form is a company's front door, and approaching it badly is visible to exactly the person you wanted to impress.

Your product, in English, becomes a message written in Japanese. That message is
submitted through the contact form on a Japanese company's own website and arrives
in their inbox, where a person reads it. Any reply goes straight back to your own
inbox. — What actually happens, end to end. Note the last step: replies go to you, not to us.

6 in 10

of the 892,468 companies in our surveyed set have a working contact form (62.2%). The share drifts down as we survey further out — the companies we reach later are the harder ones to find a channel for.

Our database, 892,468 companies, 7 Oct 2026.

40–79%

is how far form coverage spreads across 18 industries — and 34–84% once you split them into 60 sub-industries. Which segment you target decides how many companies you can reach. Budget doesn't.

Our database, 7 Oct 2026. 18 industry groups across 585,118 classified companies (40.3–78.7%); 60 sub-industries with 3,000+ companies each (34.3–84.0%).

1 in 3

of the companies we have approached had a bot check on their form (30.6%) — 20.8% an invisible one, 7.8% an interactive image CAPTCHA a person has to read and complete. Doing this by hand is the workload nobody estimates correctly.

Our database, 407,852 companies approached, 12 Sep 2026. Counted per company, not per submission.

Find your target segment here. The spread is 38.4 points, which is why we run the count on your real conditions before you commit to anything.

How it works

Five steps. We run all five

Three things are needed from you, and that is the whole list: who buys from you, a Japanese page for the link in your message to land on, and your approval of the copy before it goes out.

Target design

We filter on six axes: who your prospect sells to, industry, headcount, year founded, location (down to city ward), and which source the company came from. The first axis is the one most lists don't have — it selects companies by their customers, so a product built for restaurant operators goes to companies that supply restaurants, not to everything filed under "food."

Before you commit, we tell you how many companies your conditions actually return.

Japanese copy, written from scratch

A Japanese copywriter reads your product and writes the message. It is not a translation of your English sequence. You see it, in Japanese with an English gloss, and approve it before anything is sent.

Exclusions, applied before the first send

We remove forms carrying a "no solicitation" notice; any company you name as a customer, partner or competitor; and any company we have contacted in the past month. We also de-duplicate shared form URLs — 27,987 companies in our database share a contact form with another company, and even after removing duplicates by company name, 16,948 of them would still receive your message twice.

Our database, 23 Aug 2026. This is the single most common way an inexperienced sender gets a complaint.

Sending, configured by a person

A member of our team sets up each campaign; the system performs the submissions. This is not an unattended tool. Sends run during Japanese business hours only, and every message carries a link the recipient can use to stop future contact.

An English report, seven days after the last send

Every company we contacted, by name, with its website, the timestamp, and whether anyone there clicked the link in your message. Replies go straight to your own inbox — we do not sit between you and your prospect, so nothing waits on us.

Our data

Where the list comes from

Not a file we bought. Our own database, rebuilt continuously — and the reason a freelancer quoting you an hourly rate cannot do this job.

What is in it

5.8Mcompany records from Japan's national corporate registry, refreshed monthly

892,468companies whose contact channel we have individually mapped — form, phone, email, or nothing

6 in 10of those have a working contact form; which 6 depends almost entirely on industry

93+sources behind the targeting: public registries and company databases; activity signals such as active hiring, press releases, trade-show exhibitors and subsidy recipients; B2B comparison and RFP sites; industry directories

Our database, 7 Oct 2026. The surveyed set grows every month, so this figure moves; the registry total does not.

And the part most vendors leave out

Of the Japanese companies in the national registry whose websites we attempted, we could reach an official site for roughly 1 in 9. We found a working contact form for roughly 7 in 100. The biggest loss is at the website stage: about 89% of registered companies have no reachable site at all.

So when someone quotes you "millions of Japanese companies," they are quoting the registry, not a reachable list.

There is a second thing the registry won't tell you: what is left when there is no form differs completely by industry. In healthcare, 53.8% have a form and 31.1% have a phone number — the gap is reachable by telephone. In IT and software, 65.9% have a form but only 7.3% have a phone, and 12.1% have no contact channel we could find at all. There, the companies you miss do not come back by another route.

Funnel ratios from our 23 Aug 2026 snapshot of 5,607,906 attempted companies. Industry figures: 585,118 classified companies, 7 Oct 2026.

Why this matters for your campaign, not just for trivia. Form coverage moves with industry (40.3–78.7%) and with whether a company sells to businesses (72.0%) or only to consumers (58.4%). It barely moves at all with headcount, founding year or prefecture. So narrowing by region or company size mostly shrinks your reachable universe without improving it — which is the opposite of the advice you will get from most list vendors.

Our database, 7 Oct 2026. Industry figures from 585,118 classified companies; target-customer figures from 584,594. Target-customer classification is ours, not an official category.

Compliance & conduct

How we avoid being treated as spam

This is the first question every serious buyer asks, so here is the full answer rather than a reassurance.

Seven things we do on every campaign

1. "No solicitation" detectionForms that state they do not accept sales approaches are detected and removed from the target list.

2. One-month suppressionNo company is contacted again within one month, across all of our clients.

3. Daytime sending onlyNo overnight or early-morning submissions. Sends follow Japanese business hours.

4. Opt-out link on every messageThe recipient can stop future contact themselves, and is removed from subsequent lists. Standard on monthly plans.

5. An exclusion list you controlCustomers, partners, competitors — named before the first send, and extendable at any time afterwards.

6. Email support, around the clockIf a recipient complains or something goes wrong mid-campaign, there is someone to reach.

7. A person configures every campaignNot an unattended tool. A human sets the targeting and the copy; the system performs the submissions.

What we don't doWe don't send to consumers, we don't buy third-party lists to pad volume, and we don't contact a company you have told us to leave alone.

Where this sits in Japanese law

Japan's anti-spam act is defined by transmission method, and no published government material says whether a web-form submission falls inside that definition. We operate as though the act's duties apply to us rather than treating the silence as an exemption. Two of those duties bind us daily: a recipient's refusal stops us, and a published address does not count as published if it sits next to a request not to be sent advertising.

The full statutory position, with citations — for your legal team

Japan's anti-spam act is defined by transmission method, not by recipient. The Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail defines "electronic mail" by reference to a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications ordinance, and that ordinance names two methods: SMTP, and messaging to a mobile handset by phone number. We could not find published government material stating whether a web-form submission falls inside that definition — in either direction. We therefore operate as though the act's duties apply to us, rather than treating the silence as an exemption.

The two duties that actually bind day to day. First, once a recipient tells you to stop, you stop — Article 3(3). Second, a published email address does not count as published if it appears next to a request not to be sent advertising (Enforcement Regulation Article 3, proviso). Our one-month suppression, our opt-out link and our "no solicitation" detection are how those two duties are implemented, not optional extras.

B2B advertising to businesses is a recognised practice, within limits. The MIC and Consumer Affairs Agency guidelines of August 2011 observe that sending business-product advertising to companies that publish their addresses "is actually carried out in practice" and is "considered to be accepted within a certain range as a business custom." Within a certain range — which is why the mechanisms above exist.

Consumer-protection rules are not the regime you are in. The email advertising rules under the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions exclude contracts "concluded for or as a business" (Article 26(1)(i)). A strictly B2B programme falls outside them. We do not run consumer campaigns.

Personal data. We hold corporate records and general or departmental addresses. Addresses containing an individual's name are excluded from our lists.

CAPTCHAs. Where a form presents an image CAPTCHA, a person on our team reads and completes it. We do not defeat access-control functions within the meaning of the Act on Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access, Article 2(3).

And one layer that is not law at all. Many Japanese forms carry their own terms of use, some of which refuse sales contact or state a charge for it. We treat a stated refusal as binding whether or not a statute compels it. That is a commercial judgement, and it is also why our target counts are lower than a scraper's.

This describes how we operate. It is not legal advice and it is not a compliance opinion about your product or your claims. Your outreach copy remains subject to Japanese advertising and labelling rules, which bite hardest on regulated categories — medical, financial, food and health claims among them. Have your message reviewed by your own counsel before launch, and tell us if your category is regulated so we can plan around the review.

What you receive

A report you can hand to your board

Seven days after the last send. The report is the deliverable — the engagement is not complete without it.

Every company, named

Company name, website, and the timestamp of the submission — one row per company. You can audit the entire campaign, and you can check that we stayed inside your exclusions.

No unsent balance

You get the number of companies you paid for. If a form turns out to be unusable, it is replaced, not deducted.

Sample delivery report: a spreadsheet listing each company contacted with its URL,
the timestamp of the submission, the result, how many times that company opened the
link in the message, and any opt-out date. The company name and URL columns are
masked in this sample. — What the report looks like. The company and URL columns are masked here only — yours names every company. The figures are illustrative and are not a performance benchmark.

And this is what we send

The report shows what comes back. This shows what goes out. Below is a message of the kind we write — here for an invented client, a company selling equipment-monitoring software to Japanese manufacturers.

The middle paragraph is written for each company individually, after someone has read that company's own website. It is not a template with the company name dropped in, and it is not your English email put through a translator. That paragraph is the entire reason this channel works at all.

Japanese, as it is sent — and what each part is doing

株式会社〇〇
ご担当者様

突然のご連絡失礼いたします。
Northbridge Systems のジェームズ・コールと申します。
このご連絡は、御社の問い合わせフォームよりお送りしております。

Who it is from, and an upfront line saying this arrived through your contact form. We never disguise the channel. Saying it in the third line costs nothing and removes the first objection a Japanese reader has.

貴社は、試作から量産までを同じ現場で手がけていらっしゃるかと存じます。段取り替えの多い現場ほど、設備が一台止まったときの影響は後工程まで広がるのではないでしょうか。

"You appear to handle both prototyping and volume production on one floor. The more often a line is changed over, the further a single stopped machine reaches downstream." Written after reading their site. The first sentence says what we understood; the second draws a consequence from it that they did not state. Observation without a consequence reads as flattery.

貴社のお客様は、短納期で小ロットの発注をなさる企業が中心でしょうか。

"Would your own customers be mainly firms placing small, short-lead-time orders?" A question, not an assertion. Telling a Japanese company who its customers are is the fastest way to lose the reader; asking invites a correction instead.

そうした現場に向けて、設備の異常を停止前に知らせる仕組みを、1ラインからお試しいただけるようご用意しております。

"For that kind of floor we have a way to flag equipment trouble before it stops, which you can try on a single line." The offer, sized to what the reader can agree to today. No claim we cannot stand behind, and no pressure to decide.

ご関心をお持ちいただけましたら、下記より概要をご覧ください。
https://example.com/ja/

One link, to a Japanese page. This is why the Japanese landing page matters. A Japanese reader who clicks through to an English site stops there.

The middle three sentences follow a house style built from 6,147 messages that passed internal review: four sentences or fewer, the reader's actions in honorific form and ours in humble form, and never two humble constructions in a row. You approve your own version before anything is sent.

Pricing

Three ways in

Prices in USD. No Japanese consumption tax is added — the service is supplied to a business established outside Japan, which puts it outside the scope. What you see is what you pay us.

Start here

Pilot

One campaign, run by email, no commitment. Buy the answer to "does our message land in Japan?" — before committing a budget to finding out.

$1,000 once

One-off — nothing recurring

2,000 companies contacted
Free reachable-count check before you pay
Targeting from a standard segment template
Japanese copy written from scratch — 1 version
The full exclusion set — never reduced
Link-click identification on every company
English report, standard format, once
Run by email — no campaign call
No A/B copy testing
No monthly commitment

Request a pilot

We agree the targeting first, then send you a Stripe payment link. Roughly 3 weeks from payment to report.

Most chosen

Standard

A fixed monthly spend you can put in a budget line. Predictable, capped, no variable fee.

$2,400 / month

No per-meeting fee

8,000 companies contacted per month
Monthly target refresh as the data updates
Japanese copy — 2 versions, A/B tested monthly
Full exclusion set, carried across months
Monthly English report
Link-click identification
Monthly call with the campaign owner
Minimum term 3 months, then monthly

Request a start date

Billed monthly by card through Stripe. Total spend is fixed.

Risk shared

Performance

Twice the volume for $200 more, and we take our upside from meetings instead of the retainer.

$2,600 / month

+ $200 per confirmed meeting

16,000 companies contacted per month
Everything in Standard
Fortnightly call with the campaign owner
Copy and targeting reworked each cycle
Meeting fee billed in arrears, never in advance
Minimum term 3 months, then monthly

Discuss this plan

Billed monthly through Stripe; meeting fees are added to the next month's invoice. See the definition below.

What a 2,000-company pilot can and cannot tell you. At our own 2026 meeting-set rate, 2,000 companies works out to two to four meetings. That is too few to be a result. A pilot that returns no meetings has not shown the channel doesn't work for you, and one that returns five has not shown that it does — at this volume either outcome is inside the noise, and we would rather say so now than explain it afterwards.

What 2,000 companies does measure reliably is the part you cannot find out any other way: how many Japanese companies clicked the link in your message, which segments they came from, and what the replies actually say. Clicks run far ahead of meetings, so the signal is there at this size. That is what tells you whether to scale the same message, rewrite it, or change the segment — which is the decision the Pilot exists to inform. If you want a meeting count you can rely on, start at Standard.

Add-ons

Only the first of these has a price per plan. The rest are quoted or charged once, so they are listed as they actually work rather than forced into three columns.

Reply Desk

Every Japanese reply translated into English and sorted into interested / not now / decline, with a suggested reply drafted in Japanese for you to approve. Turnaround one business day.

Pilot+$290once

Standard+$590/ mo

Performance+$890/ mo

Japanese landing page

A single Japanese page for the link in your message to land on — written in Japanese, not translated, with one round of revisions. Delivered as a self-contained file you host on your own domain, which is better for your own search presence than a page on ours. Sending Japanese outreach to an English page is the most reliable way to waste the campaign.

+$1,400once — the same page serves every campaign after it

Forms with an image CAPTCHA

Includes forms that present an interactive image CAPTCHA, which a person on our team reads and completes. Roughly one company in thirteen uses one. It widens your reachable universe and lowers the company count at a fixed price.

Quotedagainst your target conditions — it depends which implementations your industry uses

Your own list

We can send to a list you supply, provided each row carries the company's contact form URL. Rows without one have to be researched first.

Quotedon review of your file

What a meeting costs, compared with the alternative

Per-message pricing tells you nothing useful. What you are deciding is how to get in front of Japanese companies at all. The honest comparison is against a bilingual sales hire in Tokyo, where base salary alone runs around USD 48,000 and the first meeting is months away.

Plan	Monthly cost	Companies / mo	Meetings at 0.1%	at 0.2%	Cost per meeting
Standard	$2,400	8,000	8	16	$150–300
Performance	$2,600 + fees	16,000	16	32	$281–363
One bilingual SDR in Tokyo	~$4,000+	—	—	—	Hiring cycle first

Calculation: companies contacted × meeting-set rate = expected meetings; cost ÷ expected meetings = cost per meeting. The 0.1–0.2% range is our own 2026 result and is not a forecast for your product. The SDR figure is an indicative base salary for Tokyo and excludes employer costs, tooling and management time. Pilot is not in this table — see the note above the add-ons for why.

Standard costs less per meeting if the channel works. Performance costs less if it doesn't. That is the trade: twice the coverage for $200 more, with our upside coming from outcomes rather than the retainer.

What counts as a confirmed meeting ($200). A call or meeting with a target company where the date and the attendee are agreed, and the prospect has confirmed in writing in the reply thread. Billed monthly in arrears. A cancellation or no-show is not billable if you tell us within five business days. We never invoice a meeting fee in advance, and we never count a reply as a meeting.

How you pay. Nothing is charged on this page. We agree your targeting through the form first. Once the scope is settled, a Pilot is paid through a Stripe payment link, and a monthly plan is set up as a Stripe subscription charged to your card each cycle. On the Performance plan the meeting fees are added to the following month's invoice, never taken in advance. You can cancel a subscription at the end of the minimum term by telling us before the final month.

Tax. No Japanese consumption tax is added. The service is supplied to a business established outside Japan, so it falls outside the scope of the tax. Depending on where your company is, you may still need to account for VAT or GST yourself under your own country's reverse-charge rules — that part is between you and your own accountant.

FAQ

Questions we get before the first call

Is contact-form outreach legal in Japan?

There is no single statute that settles it, which is why you will see confident answers in both directions. We set out the full position, with the citations your counsel will want, in compliance & conduct above.

Isn't this just spam with extra steps?

A fair question, and the answer is in the volume per recipient, not in the technology. Of the messages we have delivered, 99.55% of companies received exactly one, and none received more than two. We suppress for a month, we remove forms that say they don't want sales contact, we de-duplicate shared form URLs, and every message carries a way to stop. A sender who skips those four things is running something materially different from what we run.

Our database, delivered submissions, 25 Aug 2026.

Do I need a Japanese company, office or bank account?

No. We contract with your entity wherever it is. What you do need is a Japanese page for your product for the link to land on, and a plan for who takes the meeting.

What happens when a prospect replies in Japanese?

Replies go directly to the inbox you nominate, so nothing waits on us. If nobody on your side reads Japanese, add Reply Desk: we translate every reply, sort it into interested / not now / decline, and draft a Japanese response for you to approve, within one business day. It is an add-on rather than standard because most clients with a Japanese-speaking colleague prefer to answer in their own voice.

Who writes the Japanese, and can I see it first?

A Japanese copywriter on our team writes it after reading your product. You see it with an English gloss and approve it before anything is sent, and you can supply your own Japanese copy instead if you have it.

How do you keep us away from our existing customers and partners?

You give us the names or domains and we exclude them before the first send. You can add to the list at any time, and because the report names every company we contacted, you can verify it rather than trust it.

How many companies can you actually reach in my industry?

Anywhere from a few thousand to a hundred thousand, depending which one. Across our 18 industry groups, coverage runs from 40.3% in public administration to 78.7% in real estate, and the groups themselves range from 3,212 companies to 108,953. Split into sub-industries the spread is wider still — 34.3% for hospitals and clinics, 84.0% for property sales agencies. Tell us your targeting and we will tell you the real number before you commit. The check is free, and it is the right way to size a campaign.

Our database, 7 Oct 2026, 585,118 classified companies. Industry classification is ours, not an official statistical category.

What is the minimum commitment, and how do I stop?

Pilot has none — it is a single campaign and it ends. Monthly plans run for a minimum of three months and then continue month to month; tell us before the final month of a cycle and it stops. Three months is not a lock-in device: at a 0.1–0.2% meeting-set rate, one month cannot tell you whether the result came from the copy, the targeting, or chance. If you are not ready to commit three cycles, run the $1,000 Pilot instead and decide afterwards.

Do you guarantee meetings or revenue?

No, and we would not believe a vendor in this category who did. What we commit to is the volume you paid for, the exclusions you specified, the copy you approved, and a report naming every company we contacted. The Performance plan is how we put our own money behind the outcome without pretending it is certain.

What hours do you work, and how fast do you reply?

We work Japan time (JST, UTC+9), so our working day overlaps the morning in Europe and the previous evening on the US west coast. We answer enquiries in English within two business days.

Once a campaign is running you also have email support around the clock, so a complaint or a problem mid-send always has somewhere to go.

Can we talk to one of your existing clients?

Not yet, and we would rather tell you that than manufacture one. We run this channel for Japanese clients, but outside Japan you would be among our first, and we have no English-language references to offer you.

So here is what we put in front of you instead. The sample report above, so you know exactly what lands in your inbox. The Japanese message we would write for you, which you approve before anything is sent. And a free count of how many Japanese companies actually match your targeting, run on your real criteria before you pay anything.

Those three tell you more about whether this will work for you than a reference call with a company in a different market and a different language would. When we do have clients outside Japan who are willing to speak, this answer will say so.

Reach Japanese companies.
Without hiring in Japan.

Outbound into Japan usually stalls before it starts

Cold email runs into an opt-in law

The lists aren't in English, and they go stale

Translated copy reads like translated copy

Replies come back in Japanese

The front door Japanese B2B actually uses

Five steps. We run all five

Target design

Japanese copy, written from scratch

Exclusions, applied before the first send

Sending, configured by a person

An English report, seven days after the last send

Where the list comes from

What is in it

And the part most vendors leave out

How we avoid being treated as spam

Seven things we do on every campaign

Where this sits in Japanese law

A report you can hand to your board

Every company, named

No unsent balance

And this is what we send

Honest numbers, and what they don't promise

Three things we tell every new client

Three ways in

Pilot

Standard

Performance

Add-ons

Reply Desk

Japanese landing page

Forms with an image CAPTCHA

Your own list

What a meeting costs, compared with the alternative

Who this works for, and who it doesn't

This works if…

This is the wrong service if…

Questions we get before the first call

Tell us who buys from you

Reach Japanese companies.Without hiring in Japan.

Outbound into Japan usually stalls before it starts

Cold email runs into an opt-in law

The lists aren't in English, and they go stale

Translated copy reads like translated copy

Replies come back in Japanese

The front door Japanese B2B actually uses

Five steps. We run all five

Target design

Japanese copy, written from scratch

Exclusions, applied before the first send

Sending, configured by a person

An English report, seven days after the last send

Where the list comes from

What is in it

And the part most vendors leave out

How we avoid being treated as spam

Seven things we do on every campaign

Where this sits in Japanese law

A report you can hand to your board

Every company, named

No unsent balance

And this is what we send

Honest numbers, and what they don't promise

Three things we tell every new client

Three ways in

Pilot

Standard

Performance

Add-ons

Reply Desk

Japanese landing page

Forms with an image CAPTCHA

Your own list

What a meeting costs, compared with the alternative

Who this works for, and who it doesn't

This works if…

This is the wrong service if…

Questions we get before the first call

Tell us who buys from you

Reach Japanese companies.
Without hiring in Japan.