Nagi Research
Japan market-entry research

Know the Japanese market before you spend to enter it.

A fixed-price, fixed-deadline research brief on your competitors, pricing, regulation and go-to-market channels in Japan — written for founders who need a decision-ready answer, not a 40-page slide deck from a consulting firm.

Delivered in 2–6 business days · Fully async, no calls · Fixed price, no hourly billing
FILE — JAPAN MARKET ENTRY SNAPSHOT STATUS: OPEN
Delivery
2–6 business days
Format
PDF report, by email — no call
Coverage
Competitors, pricing, channels, regulation

You can't read the market you're about to enter.

Japan's competitor sites, pricing pages and user reviews are almost entirely in Japanese. Generic research gigs skim the surface; enterprise consultants price themselves out of reach for a pre-Series-A team.

Q. Who are we actually competing with?

Japanese competitors rarely show up in English search results. Their pricing, reviews and positioning are locked behind a language wall.

Q. What can we charge here?

List prices on a Japanese site don't reflect real market rates once discounts, bundling and local norms are factored in.

Q. What could stop us legally?

Import rules, industry licensing and ad regulations differ enough from the US/EU that a wrong assumption can cost months.

Fixed price. Fixed deadline. No surprises.

Every report is written by a Japan-based researcher, AI-accelerated for speed and fact-checked against primary Japanese sources — not machine-translated summaries.

Starter
$490 / report
2 business days
  • 3 direct competitors, compared
  • Local pricing & packaging breakdown
  • Key differences vs. your home market
  • PDF report by email, fully async
Start with Starter
Deep-Dive
$1,890 / report
6 business days
  • Everything in Standard
  • 5–8 short native-speaker user interviews
  • Go-to-market recommendation with channel priority
  • PDF report + 2 weeks of follow-up questions by email
Book Deep-Dive

What's actually inside a Standard report

An excerpt from a sample brief prepared for a US project-management SaaS evaluating entry into Japan.

SAMPLE — JAPAN MARKET ENTRY SNAPSHOT PAGE 2 OF 11

2.1 — Direct competitor pricing (JPY, monthly, per seat)

CompetitorEntry tierMid tierNotable term
Backlog (Nulab)¥2,970¥17,600Priced per space, not per seat
Asana (JP site)¥1,475¥3,300Annual billing assumed by default
direct.jp (local tool)¥980¥2,480Bank transfer still preferred over card
Finding: Local buyers compare on per-space or per-project pricing far more than per-seat — a Western per-seat model reads as expensive by default unless the pricing page reframes it. Two of three competitors default new signups to annual billing; monthly-only pricing is treated as a signal the vendor isn't built for long-term contracts, which matters for procurement-led buyers.

From brief to answer in four steps

The same process runs every time — that's what makes the deadline reliable.

01

You send the brief

A short intake form: your product, target customer, home-market pricing, and the specific decision this report needs to inform.

02

Research & verification

AI-assisted collection across Japanese competitor sites, review platforms and regulatory sources, verified line-by-line by a native-Japanese researcher.

03

Clarifying questions, by email

If anything in your brief is ambiguous, we email you before finalizing — no call needed. On Standard and Deep-Dive, written follow-up questions after delivery are included too.

04

Final report delivered

A clean PDF, sources cited throughout, delivered by the promised business day — every time.

15 years running businesses in Japan — not researching them from outside.

Native Japanese speaker, based in Japan, with collaborators across the US, Europe and Thailand.

I've spent 15 years running businesses inside Japan — across heavy industrial chemicals, advertising, import/export trading, and entertainment. That range means I've negotiated with Japanese suppliers, run campaigns for Japanese consumers, and structured cross-border deals myself — not just read about how Japanese business works from a research desk.

Every report is researched and fact-checked by me, a native Japanese speaker, then stress-tested with a small network of collaborators across the US, Europe and Thailand — so the analysis holds up both to how the market looks from inside Japan and to how it reads to a founder approaching it from outside.

  • Heavy industry & chemicals
  • Advertising
  • Import / export trading
  • Entertainment
  • 15 years, Japan-based