There is a page on 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.
Most foreign companies entering Japan either skip it or translate an “About us” page written for a different purpose. Both fail the same way.
It is not an About page
A 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 licences held. It is a verification document, and its virtue is that it is checkable.
Translating the first into Japanese produces a page that reads as marketing where the reader expected facts. The absence of the expected fields is itself a signal — the reader does 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 recognised as such. |
| Representative | A named person with a title. Anonymity here is unusual and noticed. |
| Founded | Longevity is read as stability. A recent date is not disqualifying; hiding it is. |
| Capital | Standard in Japan, absent from most Western pages. Its absence stands out. |
| Employees | Sizes the counterparty. Small is fine, unstated is not. |
| Business activities | Plain description of what the company does, in categories a Japanese reader recognises. |
| Licences 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 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 is 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 makes 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 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 organisation where relevant. - Give it a stable, obvious URL and link it from the global navigation and the footer. Japanese readers go looking for it.
- Keep the numbers current. An employee count that has not moved in four years is 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 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 worth more than one who discovers it three meetings in.
Being ruled out early is cheap. Being ruled out at contract stage is not, and it costs the integrator or distributor who put you forward rather more than it costs you.
Common questions
Do we have to disclose capital and employee numbers?
There is no obligation, and the convention is strong enough that omission is noticed. If a figure is genuinely sensitive, a range or a group-level figure with a note is better than silence.
Can this page just be in English?
Of all your pages, this is 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 interim, and 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 does not do the job — different fields, different language, different reader.
Working on Japan?
We are a small Japanese SEO practice 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: August 2026.
