The second meeting you’re not in: how Japan deals get approved

Picture this: A founder from Singapore, Jakarta, or Bangalore flies to Tokyo for a meeting with a large Japanese company. The Japanese contact speaks good English, nods through the demo, and asks for the deck, so the founder flies home confident that the meeting went “well.”

Then nothing happens for six weeks.

Image credit: Ulla

This is a pattern I see every month in my work as CEO of Might, a Tokyo-based firm that runs Japan sales for overseas B2B companies.

The product is rarely the issue. The problem is that the people who approve the deal – a department head, someone from legal or procurement, or sometimes a board-level sponsor – were never in the meeting room. They will read about the product later in a short internal memo written in Japanese by the contact.

If that memo is weak, the deal dies quietly. Here’s how to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Why this matters

More Southeast Asian companies are setting their sights on Japan. The weak yen makes Japanese customers relatively cheap to win, and Tokyo is actively courting foreign startups.

Around 70 Southeast Asian startups and organizations exhibited at SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, while a 2025 survey from Jetro found that about 60% of foreign companies already in Japan plan to expand their business in the country.

See also: Breaking into Japan? Start with Facebook, not LinkedIn

In my experience, however, few of the companies targeting Japan understand how a “yes” gets approved inside a Japanese enterprise.

What our outreach data shows

Might’s data gives some indication of the problem, though it’s not an industry-wide study or a controlled experiment.

We measured our first-contact emails sent between March and October 2026, offering our services to different groups of potential customers. We counted a “reply” as any response from a person (auto-replies weren’t included) and a “meeting” as a confirmed video call or visit.

• In our Japanese-language outreach to Japanese companies (mainly business development and partnership teams at SaaS and IT firms, sales and go-to-market agencies, consultancies, and transport operators), we got 52 replies (20%) and 27 meetings (10%) from 263 emails.
• In our English-language outreach to foreign B2B companies preparing to sell in Japan (mainly from South Korea, China, India, Taiwan, and North America, many of which had set up a Japan entity in the past 12 months), we got six replies (10%) and one meeting (2%) from 62 emails.

Replies were about twice as likely and meetings several times as likely in the Japanese-language group.

The real timeline of a deal

A shortcut that works