What Nobody Tells You About Actually Moving a Business to Japan

Every visa requirement is written down somewhere. What is not written down is everything that happens between the requirements, and that is the part that actually determines whether your first year here is difficult or merely busy.

I moved to Tokyo and built here. This is the list I would hand to myself.

The bank account is the hard part

Not the visa. The bank account.

Japanese banks are cautious about new foreign residents and newly formed companies, and a company account with a foreign representative director and no trading history is close to the worst case from their perspective. Some banks decline outright. Some require six months of residency. Some require you to visit a specific branch near your registered office, in person, with a stack of documents, and to explain your business in Japanese.

Budget months for this, not weeks. Start it the day you can. And do not assume that having a personal account at a bank means the same bank will open a corporate one.

If you need to move money before the corporate account exists, that constraint should shape your incorporation timeline rather than being discovered inside it.

The seal still matters, in specific places

Japan has been steadily reducing its dependence on the personal seal, and for everyday life you can now get by with a signature more often than you could five years ago.

For a company, no. You will register a company seal (実印) at the Legal Affairs Bureau, and you will need a seal registration certificate repeatedly, for the bank, for contracts, for filings. Get the seal made early and get several certificates at once, because you will be asked for them individually and each trip to the office costs you an afternoon.

The invoice system changed the calculus for small businesses

Since October 2023, business customers need a qualified invoice to claim their consumption tax credit. If you are a small or new business that would otherwise be exempt from consumption tax, your B2B customers now have a direct financial reason to prefer suppliers who are registered.

In practice, many small operators register voluntarily and give up an exemption they were entitled to, because not registering costs them clients. Factor this into your pricing from the start rather than discovering it when a customer asks for your registration number.

Year two costs more than year one

Resident tax is assessed on the previous year's income and billed the following year. So your first year in Japan is unusually cheap, and your second year carries a bill you did not have before.

This bites hardest on people whose income drops in year two, which is common for founders: high salary in the final year of employment abroad, then a lean first year building. The tax arrives sized to the good year.

The same logic applies when you leave. Plan for the trailing bill.

Business moves at the speed of trust

The most useful thing I can tell anyone selling into Japan: the first meeting is not a sales meeting. Nor, often, is the second.

Decisions are made by consensus, which means the person across the table is rarely the person who says yes. They are the person who will either advocate for you internally or not. Pushing for a close in the first conversation reads as a reason not to advocate.

This is slower and it is not worse. Once you are in, the relationships are durable in a way that quarterly-target cultures rarely produce. But if your model assumes a thirty-day sales cycle, the model is wrong, and no amount of energy fixes it.

Language is not optional, exactly

You can live in Tokyo with very little Japanese. You cannot run a company here on very little Japanese without paying for the gap: in accountants who work in English, in lawyers who work in English, in things going slightly wrong because you nodded at a document you half understood.

The new Business Manager rules now require Japanese language evidence in the business itself, which formalises what was already true in practice. Learn it, or hire it, but do not pretend the gap does not exist.

The thing I actually believe

Japan rewards patience and punishes improvisation. Almost every problem I have watched foreigners have here came from moving fast in a system that assumes you moved carefully.

That runs against the instincts of anyone who has built things in a startup culture. But the same trait that makes the bureaucracy slow makes the market stable, the customers loyal, and the standards high. You do not get one without the other.

If you want to move quickly, this is a frustrating place. If you want to build something that lasts, there are worse bets than a country that takes craft seriously enough to make you prove you are serious first.