We crossed from Belgium into France by road recently and never noticed the language change. Not because the languages are similar — they are not — but because English kept working on both sides of the line. The border was administrative. The floor underneath it did not move.
That experience goes a long way toward explaining why many European companies file Japan in the wrong category. It is worth spelling out carefully, because in our view the usual telling of this story is both condescending and wrong.
Most European companies are not lazy about language
The standard version of this argument is that English-speaking Europeans assume English works everywhere and cannot be bothered to localize. We checked, and that is not what our evidence shows.
On August 7, 2026, we requested the home page of seventeen Finnish companies with a browser asking for English (Accept-Language: en-US) and recorded which language each site actually served.
| Group | Language served | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic-facing Kesko, S Group (S-Etukortti), Elisa, OP, Posti, VR, Yle, Alko | Finnish | 8 of 8. None switched to English when asked. |
| Global industrial Nokia, KONE, Wärtsilä, Neste, Fortum | English | 5 of 5 |
| Technology Wolt, Supercell, Reaktor, Futurice | English | 4 of 4 |
The split is clean, and it is not about nationality. It is about audience. In our sample, Finnish companies serving Finns published in Finnish. Those serving the world published in English. They already make exactly the distinction that Japan requires, and they make it correctly, every day, at home.
So, in our view, the failure is not ignorance about localization. It is a filing error.
Japan often gets filed under “world,” not under “market”
A European company typically has two mental buckets. One is home, which gets the local language and everything that goes with it. The other is international, which gets English and has been quietly reliable for decades — across the EU, across the Nordics, across most of the places these companies sell.
Japan arrives and often gets dropped into the second bucket, because that is where every previous new market went and nothing bad happened. The English site carried Belgium. It carried France. It will carry Japan.
In our experience, it does not, and the reason is more specific than “Japanese people don’t speak English.”
In Japan, English is not unintelligible. It is often uncitable.
This is the part that tends to change the decision, so it is worth being precise.
Plenty of Japanese B2B buyers read English perfectly well. That is usually not the constraint. The constraint is what happens after they read it.
Japanese B2B purchases are often written up internally before a vendor is ever contacted. A staff member assembles a proposal, circulates it, and it is reviewed by people who did not do the research. That document is in Japanese. Every source quoted in it has to survive being pasted into a Japanese document and read by a manager who is unlikely to click through.
An English page usually cannot do that job. It can be understood, and then it is set aside in favor of a Japanese page that can be quoted directly. The English page loses not because it failed to communicate, but because it could not be used. We wrote about the mechanics of this in B2B vs. B2C SEO in Japan.
The same logic now applies to machines. Japanese AI assistants answering a Japanese question tend to cite Japanese sources. An English-only presence is largely invisible to that entire layer, regardless of how good the English is.
What an English-only Japan page actually does
- It usually ranks for almost nothing. Japanese buyers mostly search in Japanese, including buyers who could have searched in English.
- It tends to convert the traffic it does get at a lower rate, because the reader has to do the translation work before they can act internally.
- It can signal something you did not intend. A company with no Japanese-language presence often reads as not seriously present, which is a problem in a market where buyers check company details carefully.
- It can produce a misleading result. Low traffic gets read as “no demand in Japan” when the more likely reading is “no visibility in the language demand is expressed in.”
That last one is the expensive failure. Some companies cancel Japan on the strength of a number their own setup made almost certain.
A note on accommodation
Something we noticed on that trip: English worked in both countries, but Belgians met us further along the road. Same language, different amount of effort extended toward the visitor.
In our experience, Japan extends a great deal of effort toward visitors, and almost none of it in writing. The accommodation is in person, in service, in the room. It rarely appears on the web, where a Japanese buyer expects to be met in Japanese and does not consider this a concession.
So, in our view, the reciprocity has to be returned somewhere else. Not by speaking Japanese in meetings — an interpreter handles that — but by publishing in Japanese, sourced and dated, so the person building the internal case can use your material without doing extra work. That is what accommodation looks like in this market.
What to do instead
- Refile Japan. Move it out of the international bucket and into the one where your own home market sits. That single decision shapes most of the rest.
- Japanese on a subdirectory of your main domain, in most cases — you keep the authority you have already built. A separate
.jpstarts from zero. - Do not translate your English pages. Research in Japanese first; the questions usually differ before the words do. See Japanese keyword research.
- Start with ten to fifteen pages covering distinct intents, not a full mirror of your English site. Depth per page tends to be what ranks here.
- Record a baseline first, so that two quarters from now you are reading a real result rather than the artifact of an English-only setup.
Common questions
Our Japanese partners all speak English. Isn’t that enough?
For the relationship, often yes. For search and for the internal document that decides the purchase, usually not. Those are different audiences that happen to be the same people.
We run six European languages already. Isn’t Japanese just a seventh?
Operationally it looks like one more locale in the CMS. Editorially, in our experience, it is not. The other six can often share a structure and an argument; Japanese usually needs a different structure because the questions and the accepted forms of proof differ.
Can we start with machine translation and improve later?
You can, and it usually costs more than starting properly. Pages that answer the wrong question tend to rank poorly, and replacing them later means earning the ground twice.
How much does the Japanese-language section need to cover?
Less than your English site and to a higher standard. Ten to fifteen pages done properly usually beats a hundred translated ones, and it is cheaper.
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. We spend time in the markets our clients come from, because the assumptions people arrive with are as much a part of the work as the search data. Everything is produced natively in Japanese. The full sequence is in our Japan market-entry SEO guide. More about how we work.
Method
The language table above is our own measurement, taken on August 7, 2026. Each home page was requested once over HTTPS with a desktop Chrome user agent and Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9, following redirects, and the served <html lang> attribute was recorded. Seventeen companies, grouped by who they primarily sell to. It is a snapshot, not a survey — but it is dated, and it is repeatable.
Last reviewed: October 2026.
