CEPA has applied since 1 January 2021. CPTPP entered into force between the UK and Japan on 15 December 2024. The UK government’s guidance covers the investment protections and the market access commitments. UK government: investing in Japan.
Neither agreement produces the documents one customer needs to approve one purchase.
This is what we check with a UK B2B team before the first Japanese campaign goes live. Six items. The order matters, because items 1 to 3 decide what the landing page has to contain.
| What | How | When |
|---|---|---|
| The approval route | Ask who reviews the purchase after your meeting | Before the page is written |
| The contracting method | Ask which signature method procurement accepts | Before any implementation date is promised |
| The invoice question | Ask the buyer’s finance team which field blocks registration | Before the commercial offer changes |
| The working calendar | Ask for company closure dates, not the public holiday list | Before the campaign starts |
| The channel mix | Give every proposed channel a reason to be in or out | Before the budget is approved |
| The reply owner | Name the person who answers the form, and test it | Before the first enquiry arrives |
1. Ringi: the document your contact has to circulate
Ringi, written 稟議, is an internal approval process. JETRO’s business communication guide describes a written proposal circulating among the people a decision affects. That guide dates from 1999, so we use it for the term and not as evidence of how any particular buyer behaves in 2026. JETRO: Communicating with Japanese in Business.
The question to ask is who reviews the purchase after the meeting. An enthusiastic product user may still need procurement, finance or a department head to accept it, and none of those colleagues heard your English presentation.
So we build a Japanese purchasing brief alongside the landing page. It states the current problem, the proposed scope, the alternatives considered, the initial cost, the recurring cost, and the work required from the buyer. Exclusions sit next to the promise they limit. If implementation needs the customer’s IT team, the brief says what that team does.
A translated company history answers none of this.
Ask your contact which internal document they have to complete. Ask whether your brief can follow its headings. We cannot confirm a standard page count for a ringi submission, so we do not invent one.
Keep the quotation and its Japanese explanation on the same version number, because an approver somewhere in the chain may be reading an attachment that was saved before your last call.
2. A hanko request is a contracting question
Hanko and inkan both mean a seal. A request for a stamped document surprises a British supplier whose process ends with an electronic signature.
Japan’s Ministry of Justice states that forming a contract needs no written document and no seal, unless a specific rule applies. An unstamped contract is not automatically invalid. Official Q&A on seals.
That settles the law. It does not settle which process your customer’s procurement team will accept, so establish their requirements while the quotation is still being prepared and before anyone promises an implementation date.
Put four things on the contracting checklist: the accepted signature method, the required attachments, the authorised signatories, and the person who confirms the completed documents arrived.
Do not order a Japanese company seal because somebody said hanko. Find out which document they mean first. A procurement form, a contract and an internal approval record involve different people and different steps.
If paper originals are requested, put delivery and receipt in the schedule, and if electronic signing is accepted, agree the service and the recipient email in advance. A campaign that produces a ready buyer and no route for the paperwork has produced nothing.
3. The invoice number question depends on what you sell
A prospect may ask for an invoice registration number before adding your business to its supplier system. Resolve what that request means before changing the commercial offer.
The blanket claim, that Japanese companies cannot recover consumption tax when they buy from an unregistered overseas supplier, is too broad. The National Tax Agency separates categories of cross-border service. Business-to-business electronic services fall under a reverse-charge mechanism, and the guidance sets out when the recipient has to report that tax. NTA: cross-border services, NTA: recipients required to report under reverse charge.
Selling to a business does not establish the category on its own, and the description “B2B software” tells nobody enough to determine the treatment of your particular product.
For supplier onboarding, assemble four things: the legal entity name, the supplying location, the service description, and the invoice format you propose. Then ask the buyer’s finance team which field is blocking registration and what treatment they assumed. A screenshot of the mandatory field is worth more than a secondhand message saying overseas invoices are impossible.
The answer goes into the purchasing brief, which gives the next prospect’s finance team something specific to assess and keeps unconfirmed tax treatment off the website.
4. Golden Week and Obon need two different checks
Golden Week is a cluster of national holidays. For 2027 the Cabinet Office lists 29 April, then 3, 4 and 5 May. Obon is not a national holiday at all. The August national holiday is Mountain Day, on 11 August. Cabinet Office holiday calendar.
Company closures are a separate check.
A public holiday calendar cannot tell you whether one customer will answer. Ask each buyer for their own closure dates.
For a test starting in October 2026, the same official calendar gives 12 October, 3 November and 23 November, and we would also ask each buyer for their year-end closure dates and the day the purchasing team comes back.
A campaign keeps delivering enquiries while the person who answers them is away, so agree who covers the Japanese inbox during a closure and what the acknowledgement promises, before the campaign starts. Then report how many working days prospects actually had.
Do not count every unanswered message as a rejection. A holiday also cannot explain a proposal that has stalled for two months. Record the expected return date and the agreed next action, so the pipeline has a date you can check.
5. Yahoo! JAPAN belongs in the demand test
In our Japan work for an overseas golf-technology business, Yahoo produced purchases that a Google-only review would have missed. That was a retail purchase journey, not a B2B lead-generation benchmark. It is why we look at the local channel mix before we read weak results as weak demand.
For B2B, test each channel against the actual product searches and the enquiries they produce. This does not assume Yahoo will beat Google. It means every proposed channel has a stated reason to be in the plan or out of it.
Check the names on your agency’s proposal. On 1 April 2026, Yahoo! Ads Search Ads became LINE Yahoo Ads Search Ads, while LINE Ads and Yahoo’s display products were brought together under LINE Yahoo Ads Display Ads. Older documents still use the old names. LY Corporation: platform integration.
Keep channel results separate all the way to the sales record. Record the search term where you have it, the material requested, the buyer’s role, and the next action. An enquiry that produces a ringi document needs a different follow-up from a visitor asking whether the product is sold locally.
6. A 90-day test with purchasing milestones
Use the first fortnight on one offer and its purchasing documents for one defined segment. Build the Japanese landing page and agree who answers the form. Submit a test enquiry and confirm it reaches that person.
During the campaign, track three things: whether the prospect named an internal reviewer, whether they asked for a quotation in a particular format, and whether supplier registration started. Every contact sitting under the same meeting-completed status tells you nothing.
Keep a short objection log in English for headquarters, with the original Japanese beside it. Repeated requests about implementation responsibility and repeated enquiries from the wrong industry are two different problems, and they need two different fixes.
At the review date, compare the planned milestones with what happened, and separate three causes: weak enquiry quality, missing purchasing information, and delays tied to a closure you already knew about. Ninety days is our test period. It is not a promise that Japanese procurement finishes inside it.
We prepare the Japanese landing page, the campaign and the measurement for tests like this. Contact BlueZen Digital Co., Ltd. with your product, your target sector, and the purchasing questions you have already been asked. Our Japan market entry checklist covers the wider digital launch sequence.
Sources
Every external source is linked in the text above, at the point where it is used: the UK government’s Japan trade guidance, JETRO on ringi, the Ministry of Justice seal guidance, the National Tax Agency on cross-border services and reverse charge, the Cabinet Office holiday calendar and LY Corporation on the advertising platform change.
The anonymised advertising observation comes from our internal operating records. Client data is not published.