JapanDesk

Practical guides for selling to Japan — written by someone who does the paperwork.

About JapanDesk

JapanDesk is written by a sole proprietor in Japan who files the same paperwork the guides describe, with a drafting and checking pipeline that reads the primary sources.

The trading name and the legal details are on the commercial law notice, where Japanese law puts them. This page is about how the work is done.

How a guide is made

  1. A question nobody answered. We collect questions asked in public — on Reddit, Hacker News and dev.to — about selling to Japan, and rank them by how specific they are and how thoroughly they were ignored. A question that ended in "ask a consultant" counts as unanswered.
  2. The Japanese primary sources. The draft is built only from material published by the National Tax Agency, the Consumer Affairs Agency, Customs, JETRO, METI or the platform in question. Blogs and consultancies can be quoted as opinion; they are not used as the sole basis for a fact.
  3. An English draft. A model writes the guide against a fixed structure, with the sources in front of it.
  4. A separate check. A second pass, which cannot see the first one's reasoning, verifies that every fact traces to a quoted line in a source, that no number appears that is not in one, and that nothing in the text crosses into advice about a particular reader's tax position.
  5. A person reads it. Guides that have been read by a human before publication say so at the top. The others say that too, plainly.

Why the sources are on every page

Because the rules change, and a guide that does not tell you when it was checked is worth less than one that does. Every guide lists what it was checked against, the date it was read, and the conditions that would make it wrong. When one of those conditions is met, the guide goes back into the queue.

What we do not do

  • Tax determinations. In Japan, telling a specific business what its tax obligation is, is work reserved to a 税理士 (zeirishi, tax accountant). We describe what the published guidance says and stop at the line.
  • Legal advice and contract drafting. That is a lawyer's work.
  • Visas, immigration and company formation. Not our subject.
  • Affiliate links and paid placements. There are none, and there will not be.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us: info@coharu.work. A correction that holds up gets made and the guide's checked date moves. It is the fastest way to improve this site, and it is free.