How to get a meeting with a Japanese corporate

“Can you introduce me to NTT?”

Sometimes it is JR. Sometimes it is a trading house whose name the founder has spelled wrong. The email is polite, the product is usually good, and the answer is almost always the same: not like this, and not yet.

I have made introductions into companies like NTT and JR. A few of those went somewhere. Most did not, and at least one of the failures was mine. What follows is what I have picked up, mostly by getting it wrong first.

The introduction is the thing you are actually asking for

In Japan the word is 紹介. It is usually translated as “introduction”, which undersells it badly. A 紹介 is a transfer of standing. The person who introduces you is putting their own name behind you, and if you waste the meeting, they are the one who pays for it, not you.

This is why a warm intro in Tokyo is worth more than a warm intro in Berlin, and also why it is harder to get. When I hesitate to introduce someone, it is rarely because I doubt the technology. It is because I am not yet sure they will behave well in the room.

The real work is not finding an email address at NTT. It is finding the one person who will vouch for you, and giving them something they can defend when a colleague asks why they bothered.

Email the connector first. Then wait.

Founders email me asking for the intro and then, the same afternoon, email the company directly. It looks efficient. Losing a week to one email feels like waste when you have eleven months of runway.

Now the company has heard from a stranger. When I write two days later, I am vouching for someone they have already filed as cold outreach. My name adds nothing, and I have spent it.

Do it in order. Ask the connector. Wait until they say yes. Wait again until they have actually sent something. Only then does your name reach the company, and it reaches it attached to somebody they trust. If the connector goes quiet, that is information. Do not route around them.

One page, in Japanese, about their problem

Then comes the 企画書. One page. Not a deck.

The first paragraph is about them: what they are trying to do, what is in the way, and how you know that. The third paragraph is where your technology finally appears. Somewhere near the bottom there is one small next step that costs them almost nothing to agree to.

Write it in Japanese. I know that is annoying. It matters because that page is not for the person you meet. It is for the six people they will forward it to, and at least two of those people read English slowly and resent being made to.

Keep it to one page even when your product is complicated. If they want forty slides they will ask, and asking is a good sign.

Partnership wins. Sponsorship loses.

Use パートナーシップ. Do not use スポンサーシップ.

They sound like near-synonyms in English and they are completely different objects inside a Japanese company. A sponsorship is a cost. Somebody has to find budget for it, defend that budget in a room where the person defending it gains nothing, and carry it again next year. A partnership is a project. Somebody can own it, put their name on it, and be visibly right about it later.

You are not looking for a budget holder. You are looking for a person whose career gets slightly better if this works. That person exists in almost every large Japanese company, and they are usually two levels below whoever you were originally trying to reach.

The 稟議 clock starts after you leave

The meeting went well. Everyone was warm. Nobody said no. Then nothing happens for five weeks and you conclude that Japanese companies are polite liars.

They are not. The person across the table almost certainly cannot decide anything. What they can do is write the proposal up and circulate it upward for approval, one desk at a time, which is 稟議 — and each of those desks can ask a question that sends it back to the start.

Five weeks of nothing is usually that grinding away, not an answer. And the document going around the building is not the one you presented. It is the one your champion writes about you, from memory, on a Thursday afternoon, for people who have never met you.

Write it for them. Every follow-up you send is a draft of that internal document, so keep it short and factual and easy to paste.

What to send after the meeting

Within a day, send the 議事録 — the meeting minutes. One page. What was discussed, what was agreed, who does what, and a date.

No new information. Do not attach anything they did not ask for. Do not add the case study you forgot to mention. This document exists to be forwarded, and every extra thing you put in it is one more thing that can raise a question inside a company you cannot see.

Then a short message about two weeks later. Not “just checking in”. Something small and real: a new customer, a result, a date you now have. Give your champion a reason to move the file, not a reminder that they owe you an answer.

If three months pass with nothing, go back to the connector, not to the company. Ask what happened. Usually somebody will tell you honestly, and usually it is something you could not have guessed, like a reorganisation in April.

I still get this wrong

I grew up in Kawasaki. I have a Japanese passport and I run a Japanese company, and I still write these emails too long, still lead with the technology when I am excited, still send the follow-up on day one because I cannot help myself.

I am more useful to a founder when I make myself slow down: ask the connector, wait for a real answer, put their problem in the first paragraph, and then wait again.

This does not get you a contract. It gets you a second meeting with someone who now has a reason to defend you when you are not in the room. In Japan that is most of the game, and it is roughly the opposite of how I was taught to sell in every other market I have worked in.