Does Your Distributor Need to be Fluent in English?

Breaching the Language Barrier.

Obviously, you need to be able to communicate at a fairly granular level with your business partner, but overcoming the language barrier alone will not guarantee success.  Your partner must be committed to your product or service and capable of marketing, troubleshooting, financing and distributing your product effectively.  If you find a company that can effectively do all of the above, but do not work effectively in English, rather than prioritize English ability and continue the search, you should find another way to bridge the language barrier.  Hire a Japanese speaking person to translate.  Suggest sharing the cost of this service.  Hire a Japanese speaker to manage the relationship. This is an ‘interpreting’ role as you will depend on this person not just for passing messages back and forth but for making judgements about the content of the messages.  What is meant as opposed to what is merely ‘stated’ by the other side.  Effective, loyal and diligent distributors are not exactly a dime a dozen in Japan or anywhere, so if you find one but they don’t work well in English, my advice would be to hold on to them and find a way to communicate with them in Japanese. 

You might assume that any company interested in selling products or services originating outside Japan would have a fairly high degree of English ability in-house.  While this is slowly changing, it is still far from universal.  Surprisingly large companies in Japan can have levels of English capability verging on the non-existent.   There is almost universally now some ability to communicate in written English, via email or even still in 2024, the dreaded fax.  This is especially so as on-line machine translation software such as Deepl and other AI driven translation tools proliferate.  But try to move the conversation ‘off line’ to a phone or Zoom call and you may quickly find that your interlocutor is a different person when it comes to verbal English communication skills.  This is a function of how English is taught throughout the Japanese education system and is best left as a subject for another discussion.

The good news is that English is increasingly being recognized as an essential skill and not just a ‘plus’ or ‘nice to have’ capability for virtually all Japanese companies.  This is not only because more small and mid-sized, hitherto 100% domestic market reliant companies are having to look overseas for growth markets, but also because as the number of non-Japanese residents increases to fill the critical labour shortage in Japan, companies are having to offer more and more services in English domestically.