A brand deciding where to launch in Japan will often find a shortlist of shows with the word 国際 — international — in the title. The decision that follows is usually about budget and floor space. The decision that does not get made is about
Somewhere in the work of entering Japan, a question about katakana stops being a question about spelling and becomes a question about who decides. At that point the brand wants a ruling. Two katakana spellings are on the table, both defensible, and somebody asks whether
A brand commissioning work in Japan asks for a quote and gets back a document with an unfamiliar shape. Not a list of deliverables with a number beside each one. Something closer to an argument: here is the objective, here is the set of things
A brand preparing for Japan decides a great many things about itself. What it is for. Who it is for. What shelf it belongs on. The last one is not actually available to decide. By the time a product reaches a Japanese store, it has already
At some point a brand entering Japan has to write its own name in Japanese, and then keep writing it that way. On the packaging, in the app, in the press release, in the search ads. One spelling, used everywhere, because inconsistency in a brand's
A Japanese supplier sends over their accessibility position, and the English reads cleanly: Level AA conformance in JIS X 8341-3:2016 That is the National Police Agency's English page. Here is a different organization, the Mitsubishi group's portal site, describing what looks like the same thing:
Before a brand builds a digital experience for Japan, it has a picture of the user it is building for. The picture is rarely written down. It shows up in what gets prioritized: how much reassurance to put on the page, how much explanation, how
A launch date gets chosen early, and it usually gets chosen on the calendar of whoever is doing the choosing. A quarter that suits the home market. A window after a global campaign. A month when the team has capacity. Somewhere on the Japanese side there
Your Japanese copy came back accurate. The terminology is right, the claims survived legal, a native speaker checked it. It still reads as a translation. The reasonable next question is whether there is a standard for this — something the work could have been held to.
A brand with a Japan launch on the calendar arrives at the same point in the same order. The market is chosen. The budget exists. What is unsettled is how much of the brand has to change for it — the copy, the imagery, the