Selling to the Japanese Government

Why Access Isn’t the Same as Traction

I have spent most of a working life in Japan on a problem foreign headquarters keep mistaking for a calendar: serious people fly in; they pursue meetings. 

And yet, the meetings are almost never the hard part. The hard part is what does not arrive with the tea: an endorsement, a living file, a next introduction to someone inside the System who is willing to have their name affiliated with it. 

I get hired when that gap has already opened, usually after a year or more has been spent discovering the gap in the most expensive and time-consuming way. Then I get the call: “can you please fix this?”

When Washington Logic Meets Tokyo

This is one of those stories. The company’s name is off the page. The product was secure-communications technology— the kind meant to keep communications from being looted — and the ambition was Japan’s government and defense market. The client was a company that had already mastered Washington, convinced that Tokyo would behave like the last targeted market because, well, “business is international, right? It is the same everywhere, isn’t it?” Headquarters could already smell the sale. This thinking is not limited to Americans, by the way.

The visiting executives essentially created the technology. Twenty years spent finding their way through the political, administrative, and defense architecture that spells Washington is not a small achievement, and that fluency had made the government market at home a profitable business. Sister teams had been dispatched to other capitals and were making inroads and Japan, with a wholly owned subsidiary already on the ground, looked like the obvious next assignment.

That subsidiary had been here a decade, selling commercially into the world’s largest banks and communications companies. Tokyo had just stood up a Digital Agency, in fact. “Of course,” the thinking at home went, “The Government of Japan is now staring at the problems this company has been solving for twenty years. Of course the ministries will welcome a world-class leader with open arms.” The job, as headquarters understood the job, was simply to represent that leader and explore “collaboration.” Which, in business parlance, meant sales.

Since that is not how this market works pretending otherwise is not a kindness. Hoping and expecting otherwise is an expensive delay, and this story is what that delay looks like.

An Interloper in the System

From the GoJ side of the table, this company was an interloper. The newspapers were already full of stories about ransomware hitting hospitals and factories, so the need was not imaginary: the product promised to protect the sanctity of communications. Delivering on that promise, however, meant someone in Tokyo would have to open the government’s own data flows to an American vendor and live with the assumption that those flows, too, would stay protected. Commercial Japan can accept that kind of risk on a private contract. The national government cannot treat the same risk as a purchase order. Even with an ally… especially with an ally. Home-grown firms were already working at a sprint to copy, license, or buy their way around the American lock on the market. So interloper is the right characterization.

My real assignment was never representation. The real assignment was whether a foreign company would be allowed near a piece of the state’s own plumbing, and whether anyone inside the System would put their name on the next introduction.

Six Trips, Pleanty of Meetings, No Momentum

Before I was hired, the headquarters team had already come to Tokyo on six well-planned occasions over an eighteen-month stretch. The visitors spoke only English, so they plumbed the Embassy through their Washington network and left each visit with a high-level briefing and a handful of introductions. In their account, a meeting was a breakthrough, a stepping-stone, proof the sale was close enough to smell. “I love coming to Japan,” one of them said. “Everyone is so nice and helpful.”

Here is the part that does not travel. People in this country will easily entertain a meeting. There is a manner for having or requesting a meeting, a choreography, even interchangeable faces who can run the choreography without missing a beat. What does not come with the tea is an endorsement. 

College friends talk over beers beforehand or afterwards; the phone numbers are already logged. A door can open and still carry no momentum at all. By the sixth trip the visitors had seen the major players, or the subordinates of the major players, and telegraphed the whole design. The vine was dead and what the team was increasingly collecting was a runaround.

When the Stalled File Becomes Someone Else’s Fault

Irritation followed, then suspicion. Perhaps the effort was being sabotaged. The Japan office was commercial, Japanese, built on quarterly bonuses and already jaded about government clocks. Headquarters began to wonder whether those colleagues had been a little loose about the grand strategy — side conversations with the banks and the carriers the subsidiary already had standing contracts with. Unable to explain the stall any other way, the visitors pulled the cards closer to the chest. The video calls grew more secretive. “Why did we have such good momentum,” they asked, “and now everything just seems more difficult?” That is not a helpful question to send home when high-paid executives have been disappearing for a whole week every twelve weeks and patience in the home office is beginning to wear thin.

The company had worked on the case for almost two years without result. The certification the company needed had already been submitted — 1.5 years earlier. Headquarters had pursued the application the way headquarters pursues most things: “is it done yet, is it done yet, when can we start sales?” 

This is what happens with the wrong projection, with showing up late, with the wrong deliverable, with an introduction from the wrong endorser. While the file was not rejected, it was not alive. The understanding moved on to “We need someone who is savvy in this area like no one else. We need a gorilla.” 

The Work Behind the Meeting

They found me, gave me the brief and left for another eleven weeks. Over those weeks we regularly spoke ninety minutes at a time, every other week: documents, talking points, the introductions already damaged, and a map of the people who actually mattered.

Then came the work that looks a lot like scheduling but is distinctly different.

We needed pre-meetings that would make the next Tokyo round possible, and that was harder than it sounds. A buzz already surrounded the headquarters team and what the team intended.

Competitors — the college-cohort kind, the ones who have been exchanging information like water since university — were pacing every move. Another Embassy briefing would not open the next door. Another handshake at the Chamber would not either. What the next door required was an accelerant, an endorsement from inside the system. Someone of stature who could walk a file to an underling without the underling having two dozen preliminary questions and wondering why a stranger was suddenly in their room.

Finding the Endorsement

I will not describe how that person is found. The ask itself is delicate because, above all, the work has to roll out in a Japanese way. Every other way has already been tried, over a century, by hundreds of hopeful traders trying to secure a sweet sale, open a doorway, lock in a market. The tricks, the shortcuts, the scams: everyone here knows them by smell.

With a short list of named people, some of whom had worked for our interlocutor in the past, we cut the deck of slides down to two pages and walked those two pages, one desk at a time, into targeted corners. Methodically, and without making the visit an imposition. The reply that matters here is not “yes” but “it is worthy of a discussion; I will tell my boss and get back to you.” That sentence arrives only when an endorser is standing behind the paper, and only when the approach looks like an everyday occurrence instead of a raid. Then, a visit or two later, the next ask can be made without heat: the architects from headquarters will be here in five weeks; can we arrange for our principals to talk?

The Door Opens

For the client, my involvement was an added cost. That involvement also shaved at least ten months off a progression the company had been working, unsuccessfully, for almost 2 years — maybe even away from utter failure. The likelier alternative, left alone, was not a slower yes. It was a “no” that never quite announced itself.

Three months after the hire, the certification came through. Definitive. The visiting team was elated. Headquarters extended the contract for a year. The company was authorized to participate in the government market — which is a door, yet still not the end result.

Permission is Not the Same as Business

The game morphed, as these games do. Other hoops appeared: materials, stakeholders, return meetings, a sales story that did not sound like Washington. And “qualified” is not “chosen.” Being allowed to stand in line is not the same as being invited for a trial. Exhaustion set in again. Hotel Monday night. Four meetings a day. Dinners. Friday morning to Narita so the same men could be fresh for Monday at headquarters. Executives who were lethal in cowboy boots among the mavericks at home had no Japanese and no feel for the air in the room they were trying to occupy.

This time headquarters did not fire the team and start all over with the same model. Headquarters switched out the Japan roster and inserted a new team. The new leader had spent time in Japan with the US military. They assumed that meant he knew the country and spoke the language.

“Japan Experience” Is Not the Same as Being Inside the System

This is a common second move: replace the team with someone who has ‘Japan experience.’ But time spent in Japan is not the same as standing inside its decision-making, and no amount of goodwill closes that gap.

Cavalier mistakes like that are fatal in this country. No amount of money poured into the hole will carve out a position if the person in the chair cannot read the room he has been sent to occupy. The new team leader, did not save anything that needed saving, try though he might. The thing that needed saving was not the file and the file was already in a pile stacked on a table. Underneath.

The Company Leaves

Easier, more lucrative geographies were waiting: Australia, Canada, the European Union. Attention went there. Resources followed. The government initiative in Japan was folded, and the engagement ended with the initiative. After two years of concentrated effort, and of incremental, methodical success, the company is not in this market now. The market belongs to the domestic firms, and to the internationals who handed enough authority to the people who still live here.

This is not the same thing as saying the work failed.

A dead file came back to life. A certification that had sat for two years cleared in three months. A year of Embassy briefings that produced niceness and no momentum was replaced, in a few sequences, with named desks and a sentence that traveled upward. Ten months came off the clock. The company was in. The company chose not to stay.

The Real Currency Is Momentum

A meeting in Japan is easy. Momentum is the scarcer thing, and niceness will not purchase it. An Embassy briefing is hospitality, not a customer. A certificate is permission to stand in line, not a contract to be taken from it. The sieve starts at the first introduction and checks again at the second, and at the third if there is one. Files go quiet when the projection is wrong, when the endorser is wrong, when anything at all is amiss. Files move when the temperature changes.

There is always another layer, and the layers are not a plot against foreigners. The local firms walk the same stairs. Those firms are simply quicker on their feet, and they do not fly out on Friday. This country rewards the ones who commit past the first door and weeds out the rest — the weak-willed, the skin-of-the-teeth funded, the here-today-gone-tomorrow — foreign and Japanese alike. The decision is a group decision.

Make the mark, carry the goods, exceed the expectation, commit for the future, and there is a place. Arriving at that place requires attributes not everyone possesses: not easily attained, not for a week at a time, not measured in quarters. That is Japan’s self-defense mechanism at work. It is not hostility. It is how the country decides who gets to stay.