An agency that wants a Japanese website to review, feature or write about a client’s product usually finds there is no editor’s address to write to. There is a contact form in Japanese, and behind it a site owner who receives a steady flow of proposals, most of them selling something. This article describes that flow from the receiving end and what gets a reply.
We run several Japanese sites and a company site, so we receive these pitches too. Between July 1 and October 8, 2026, Amanaut received about 160 partnership and collaboration requests through two contact forms, and more by email and LinkedIn. On October 8, we read and sorted every one by what the sender actually wanted. On October 9, we also checked how 21 Japanese review and comparison sites take inquiries. Both are below, with what we would do in the sender’s place.
The short answer
Pitch one named product to one site, for that site’s readers, through the door the site provides. Japanese sites mostly take inquiries through an お問い合わせフォーム (otoiawase fōmu, “contact form”) rather than a published email address: 17 of the 21 review sites we checked used a form, and none of those forms had English labels. Many have a separate route for advertising, and a few address sales pitches directly.
Before replying, a Japanese site owner usually wants to know three things: who is asking and for which client, why the article would be worth something to their readers, and how money and labeling will be handled. Requests that answered those questions were rare in our inbox and went smoothly. Requests that hid a sale or a link swap behind the word “partnership” were declined, and sending them again did not change the answer.
If the feature is paid, it is advertising and has to be labeled. Japanese law has required that since October 2023, and it holds the advertiser responsible: your client.
What 160 partnership requests looked like
We counted every message framed as a partnership or collaboration proposal that reached us between July 1 and October 8, 2026: 135 through the contact form of our company site and 27 through the contact window of a consumer service we operate, plus a smaller number by direct email and LinkedIn. Sorted by what the sender wanted, more than 90% were sales pitches presented as partnerships. They fell into a few groups:
- offers to take on production or video work as a subcontractor
- sales outsourcing
- reciprocal link offers
- offers to sell us paid placement
- staffing
- M&A brokerage, mass-mailed
The same senders came back. One company sent six requests in the period, and two others sent three each. Repetition did not change our answer.
The few we replied to each had a specific need we could check. A firm was looking for an expert to support its client’s work on AI search. An advertising agency with health and cosmetics advertisers wanted to source articles and expert supervision (監修, kanshū) from outside; we explain that role in YMYL supervision in Japan. An individual was connecting demand for article production and supervision. A regional web agency proposed that each of us introduce the other’s columns to our readers. Overseas sellers of backlinks who approached us on LinkedIn were declined.
How Japanese websites take pitches
On October 9, 2026, we took the pages ranking in Google’s top 10 in Japan, as reported by Rakko Keyword, for 海外eSIM おすすめ, ワイヤレスイヤホン おすすめ and プロジェクト管理ツール 比較, and the top 20 for VPN おすすめ, 家計簿アプリ おすすめ and モバイルバッテリー おすすめ (“recommended” and “comparison” searches for travel eSIMs, earbuds, project tools, VPNs, budgeting apps and power banks). We kept one site per operator among those that review or compare other companies’ products, setting aside retailers, marketplaces, app stores, vendors’ and agencies’ own blogs, video, Q&A and blogging platforms, and one foreign site. That left 21 sites, from personal blogs to large comparison services. We followed each site’s contact link and read the form without sending anything.
| What we looked for | Sites |
|---|---|
| Inquiries by contact form (the site’s own or a hosted form) | 17 of 21 |
| A published email address instead of a form | 2 of 21 |
| No working contact route (one form did not load, one site had no contact link we could find) | 2 of 21 |
| Form labels in English | 0 of 17 forms |
| Phone number asked for | 9 of 17 forms (required on at least 5) |
| Name in katakana asked for | 3 of 17 forms (required on 2) |
| Separate route or option for advertising or paid listing | 12 of 21 |
| Sales pitches addressed directly (a warning, a category or a list of refusals) | 3 of 21 |
The form is the front door
Only two of the 21 sites gave an email address instead of a form. Expect to type into a Japanese form, and expect your message to join everything else that comes through it. On several sites the same form also handles membership cancellations, newsletter opt-outs and reader questions.
Fields written for Japanese senders
Nine of the 17 forms asked for a phone number, and at least five made it mandatory. One split the number into three boxes that accept digits only, the shape of a Japanese number; another wanted half-width digits without hyphens. If your number does not fit, say so in the message and give it there.
Three forms asked for the name in katakana as well, the フリガナ (furigana, “reading”) that tells the recipient how to pronounce it; two made it mandatory, and one required 全角 (zenkaku, “full-width”) characters for both name and reading. Write your name in katakana as you pronounce it. One comparison site refused free webmail addresses and asked for the company’s official name including its legal form. One blog’s spam check asked the sender to type a word in hiragana. The forms seemed built for Japanese senders, not against foreign ones.
Advertising often has its own door
Twelve of the 21 sites had a separate page, form or inquiry option for advertising or paid listing (広告掲載, kōkoku keisai, “advertising placement”). Two also offered an option for asking the site to feature a product (掲載依頼, keisai irai, “request to be featured”), kept apart from advertising. Choose the route that matches your offer. If the client is paying, the advertising route usually reaches the people who can agree on a price and a label. If you are asking for unpaid coverage, the advertising route is likely to put you in front of a sales team.
Three sites address pitches directly. One warns that sales messages bringing it no benefit will not be answered. One has an inquiry category for sales pitches to the company itself. A large product-comparison site lists the requests it never accepts: advertising without a PR label, changes to the order of its rankings, and adding products to them.
Writing the first message: Japanese or English
As receivers, we do not decline a message for being in English. We do decline machine-translated Japanese drafts, and a machine-translated first message suggests the article will be the same. If you write in Japanese, have a native speaker write or check it. If you write in English, keep it short and open with two or three lines of Japanese saying who you are and what you want, so whoever reads the form can route it. The difference between translation and localization applies to a pitch as much as to a page.
In either language, the first message should let the site decide without a second email. It should cover:
- your agency’s registered name, country and website
- the client and the one product, with its Japanese name if it has one
- the section or article of the site that made you choose it
- what you are offering: a paid feature, an interview, data or a sample
- the budget and the PR label, if the feature is paid
- how and when the draft would arrive
What a Japanese site owner checks before replying
Identity usually comes first. A Japanese company can be looked up on the National Tax Agency’s Corporate Number Publication Site, which lists each company’s 13-digit corporate number (法人番号, hōjin bangō) with its name and head-office address. An agency abroad usually cannot be checked that way, so make up for it: give the registered company name, the country and registration number, a named person with a role, and a website and email domain that match. The client should be as easy to identify, ideally through a Japanese company page of the kind described in the Japanese company profile page.
Then come the reader and the claims. “We would love to collaborate” gives a site owner nothing to decide on; one sentence naming the site’s readers and what they would learn is usually worth more than a paragraph about the client’s mission. We decline claims we cannot check, so give a source the site can open for every number about the product.
What made the smooth requests smooth
Three sponsored feature requests from outside Japan show what has worked for us. A European outreach agency working with a Japanese partner placed a feature about a hosting company with us. It took four weeks from first email to publication, most of it waiting for the draft, and we invoiced on publication. Another European agency, acting for a travel eSIM brand, chose which of our sites fit, sent a finished Japanese draft as a document and asked for publication the same day. It went live that day and was paid two days later. A US software company asked for our conditions, plus answers to three specific questions, before deciding.
Each named one product and a clear reader, came with a finished draft or a clear brief, and agreed on price and labeling before anything was written. Our own sponsored features are built the same way: one Japanese article about one product, labeled PR, on terms agreed before writing starts.
We accept drafts as a Google Doc or in the body of an email, not as ZIP files or download links, which are a common route for malware. We also answer in writing, so both sides have the terms in one thread.
What gets declined, and the label you cannot skip
Our refusals follow the same line as our article on link building in Japan. We decline link-only requests and reciprocal link offers, along with machine-translated drafts and claims we cannot check. If the only thing a request asks for is a link, it is usually the paid-link arrangement that article tells you to refuse.
Every sponsored article we publish is labeled PR, and the reason is Japanese law rather than house style. Since October 1, 2023, the Consumer Affairs Agency has treated advertising that consumers cannot recognize as advertising, known in Japan as ステマ (sutema, “stealth marketing”), as a violation of the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. Its Q&A states that the party regulated is the business whose product is advertised, while the influencers and affiliates who post at its request are not. It gives 広告 (kōkoku, “advertisement”), 宣伝 (senden, “publicity”), プロモーション (“promotion”) and PR as examples of labels, provided the page as a whole makes the advertising clear. An agency that asks a Japanese site to drop the label is asking it to expose the agency’s own client.
Timing and follow-up
Japan takes most of its time off in three windows: the New Year holidays, Golden Week in late April and early May, and Obon in mid-August. A first pitch sent the week before any of them is likely to wait in a queue that is cleared afterward. Our Japanese content calendar has the dates.
Outside those windows, allow for slow replies too. One site in our check warns that answers can take about seven business days, and two others say some inquiries may not be answered at all. At least three of the forms promise an automatic confirmation email; if none arrives, check the address you typed before sending again.
Follow up once, in the same thread or with a reference to the first message, after about ten business days, and then stop. The company that sent us six requests in just over three months did not get six times the attention.
Money: price, invoice and payment
Settle money before anyone writes, in the same email as the label. Japanese quotes may exclude consumption tax (税別, zeibetsu, “excluding tax”), as ours does, so confirm which is meant. Ask who invoices whom, in which currency, by what method and by when. A small site may not be set up to receive money from abroad, and it is better to find that out before the draft is written.
Our own terms, for comparison: JPY 40,000 excluding tax per sponsored feature, paid once, invoiced on publication and payable within 14 days by Wise, PayPal or Japanese bank transfer, with a PR label on every article. Whether Japanese consumption tax applies to a buyer outside Japan is the first question below.
Common questions
Three questions agencies often ask once the conversation turns practical.
Is Japanese consumption tax added when the buyer is outside Japan?
Japan’s National Tax Agency treats delivering or placing advertising over the internet as an electronic service (電気通信利用役務の提供). For these services, whether a transaction takes place in Japan is decided by where the recipient is: for a company, the location of its head office or principal office. Where that is outside Japan, the NTA’s guidance says the transaction is not a domestic one, and consumption tax is not charged on transactions outside Japan.
Two cautions. The NTA lists producing a work, such as writing an article, as something other than an electronic service, so if the site also writes the article, that part may be assessed differently. Its Q&A also works through special cases such as services received through a branch. Ask a tax adviser to confirm your own case.
Can we offer a free product instead of a fee?
You can offer one, but expect a sample to buy consideration rather than an article. Under the Consumer Affairs Agency’s guidance, whether an article about a gifted product counts as your client’s advertising depends on the facts: if the site decides what to write on its own, it generally does not; if your client shapes the content, it counts and needs a clear label. Ask the site how it handles and labels gifted products before you send anything.
How long does a sponsored article take to publish?
In our experience, the draft decides it. One of our features took four weeks from first email to publication, mostly waiting for the client’s draft; another went live the same day a finished Japanese draft arrived, with price and label agreed beforehand. If the site has to write or heavily edit the article, allow more time, and avoid the Japanese holiday windows.
Working on Japan?
Nihongo Search is published by Amanaut, Inc., a small Japanese SEO and content company in Tokyo working with companies entering the Japanese market. What to refuse when a conversation turns to links is in link building in Japan, and how a client should introduce itself to Japanese readers is in the Japanese company profile page. More about how we work.
Sources
The inbox count and the contact-route check are our own. Everything else comes from the sources below.
- Amanaut, partnership and collaboration requests received July 1 to October 8, 2026, through our company site’s contact form, a consumer service’s contact window, email and LinkedIn, sorted by hand on October 8, 2026
- Nihongo Search, contact routes of 21 Japanese review and comparison sites, October 9, 2026; candidate pages from Google’s top 10 or top 20 in Japan for six queries, as reported by Rakko Keyword on the same day
- Consumer Affairs Agency, 令和5年10月1日からステルスマーケティングは景品表示法違反となります (Japanese), rule in force from October 1, 2023
- Consumer Affairs Agency, ステルスマーケティングに関するQ&A (Japanese), questions 1, 5, 11 and 17, accessed October 9, 2026
- Consumer Affairs Agency, Establishing Trusted Representation, for the English name of the Act, accessed October 9, 2026
- National Tax Agency, Tax Answer No. 6210, 国外取引 (Japanese), law as of April 1, 2026
- National Tax Agency, 国境を越えた役務の提供に係る消費税の課税に関するＱ＆Ａ (Japanese, PDF), revised June 2026, questions 2-1, 10 and 12
- National Tax Agency, Corporate Number Publication Site, accessed October 9, 2026
Last reviewed: October 2026.
