There is a page on nearly every Japanese company website that foreign companies treat as boilerplate and Japanese buyers treat as due diligence. It is called 会社概要 — the company profile — and in B2B it is frequently the page that decides whether you get contacted.
Many foreign companies entering Japan either skip it or translate an “About us” page written for a different purpose. Both tend to fail the same way.
It is not an About page
A typical Western About page tells a story: the founding insight, the mission, the team’s values, some photographs of people looking pleased. It is a persuasion document.
A Japanese 会社概要 is a table. Registered name, address, representative, founding date, capital, employee count, banks, main clients, business licenses held. It is a verification document, and its virtue is that it is checkable.
Translating the first into Japanese tends to produce a page that reads as marketing where the reader expected facts. The absence of the expected fields is itself a signal — most readers do not conclude that you are informal; they conclude that something is not being stated.
What the table normally contains
| Field | Why the reader wants it |
|---|---|
| Registered company name | The legal entity, not the brand. Lets the reader check the corporate register. |
| Address | A real one, written in Japanese order, including building and floor. A virtual office address is often recognized as such. |
| Representative | A named person with a title. Anonymity here is unusual and noticed. |
| Founded | Longevity tends to be read as stability. A recent date is not disqualifying; hiding it can be. |
| Capital | Standard in Japan, absent from most Western pages. Its absence stands out. |
| Employees | Sizes the counterparty. Small is fine; unstated usually is not. |
| Business activities | Plain description of what the company does, in categories a Japanese reader recognizes. |
| Licenses and registrations | Required in regulated sectors, and quietly reassuring elsewhere. |
A foreign company with a Japanese subsidiary should give the Japanese entity’s details, with the parent named separately. A foreign company without one should say so plainly rather than leaving the reader to work it out.
Why this is an SEO question and not just a design one
Three reasons, and the third is the one that has changed recently.
- It is a destination in the buying process. Japanese B2B buyers tend to research the company as well as the product, and the internal proposal usually includes a line about who the vendor is. Your 会社概要 supplies it, or something else does.
- It carries the trust signals that content alone cannot. The named authorship and professional supervision we described in YMYL and named supervision operate at the article level. This page operates at the company level, and both are being read.
- It is where machines resolve who you are. A page stating a registered name, address and founding date, marked up with structured data, gives search and AI systems a stable entity to attach everything else to. Without it, your Japanese content can look like a set of pages by an unidentified author.
That last point connects directly to the entity work in link building in Japan. A consistent Japanese company name, stated in one authoritative place, is the anchor that helps every mention elsewhere count toward the same entity rather than three weak ones.
Practical points that get missed
- Put it in HTML, not in an image or a PDF. Company profiles are surprisingly often shipped as a designed PDF. Readers accept it; crawlers and AI systems usually get much less from it.
- Use one canonical Japanese company name and use it identically everywhere — this page, your listings, your partners’ sites, your press releases.
- Add
Organizationstructured data with the same values as the visible table. Legal name, address, founding date, parent organization where relevant. - Give it a stable, obvious URL and link it from the global navigation and the footer. Japanese readers often go looking for it.
- Keep the numbers current. An employee count that has not moved in four years tends to be read as neglect of the page, which is read as neglect of the market.
If you have no Japanese entity yet
You can still do this well, and in our view, pretending otherwise is the mistake.
State the parent company’s registered details, say clearly that there is no Japanese subsidiary yet, and explain how a Japanese customer is supported in practice — who they contact, in what language, in which time zone, and who holds the contract. A reader who learns this on your page and decides you fit is usually worth more than one who discovers it three meetings in.
Being ruled out early is cheap. Being ruled out at the contract stage is not, and it often costs the integrator or distributor who put you forward more than it costs you.
Common questions
Do we have to disclose capital and employee numbers?
There is no obligation, but the convention is strong enough that omission tends to be noticed. If a figure is genuinely sensitive, a range or a group-level figure with a note is usually better than silence.
Can this page just be in English?
Of all your pages, this is probably the one that most needs to be in Japanese. It exists to be quoted into a Japanese internal document.
Should we list our clients?
Named Japanese clients carry real weight, and permission takes time. Ask early. Categories and sectors are a reasonable stopgap, and we think unverifiable claims are worse than nothing.
Where should it sit in the site structure?
In the Japanese section, linked from the Japanese navigation. A link to your global corporate page usually does not do the job — different fields, different language, different reader.
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. Entity and structured-data work — making sure Japanese search and AI systems can resolve who you are — is part of how we approach this. The full sequence is in our Japan SEO guide. More about how we work.
Last reviewed: October 2026.
