I didn’t plan to start a company in Japan. BenStay began as a side project — a guesthouse, then two, then a handful of properties managed with spreadsheets and late-night WhatsApp messages. At some point the side project became a registered LLC, and somewhere after that I realised I was actually running a technology company in a country where the business infrastructure operates mostly in a language I had to study at a kitchen table.

Five years in, here’s what I actually wish someone had told me.

TL;DR

  • Setting up a 合同会社 (LLC) in Japan is fast and cheap — the friction is in what comes after
  • The language barrier matters less than you expect for daily operations, and more than you expect for banking and tax
  • Japan’s B2B relationships run on trust and repetition — cold outreach almost never works
  • Building tools to solve your own problems is how you find out whether there’s a real product (Reshito and Aimitsu both started that way)
  • The bureaucracy is real, but it’s mostly predictable — and that’s actually a feature

Why Does Japan Make Sense for a Tech Startup?

Japan is not the first country most founders picture when they imagine building a tech company. But for a specific type of founder — one building for the Japanese market, in hospitality, freelancing, or regulated industries — it makes a lot of sense. The market is large, the customer base is broadly underserved by English-first SaaS, and domestic competitors tend to move slowly. If you can read the room, there is room.

The inbound tourism boom has sharpened this dynamic considerably. Visitor arrivals to Japan have surpassed pre-pandemic highs, and the infrastructure to serve that demand — booking tools, compliance software, multilingual communication layers — hasn’t kept pace. That gap is where BenStay lives, and it’s a gap I can see getting wider before it narrows.

What’s Surprisingly Easy Once You’re Set Up?

The mechanics of running a 合同会社 are simpler than most people expect. You can register using the Ministry of Justice’s online filing system for less than ¥60,000 in registration fees, and the legal structure is clean and predictable. Once you have a corporate bank account (more on that below), invoicing works smoothly and the tax filing framework for a small LLC is genuinely manageable.

On the operations side, Japan’s vendor and logistics ecosystem is extraordinary. Things arrive when they’re supposed to. Contractors show up on time and do what they said they would. Once you’ve built a relationship with a supplier, work flows with minimal friction. Coming from a background of managing properties in other markets, this part genuinely surprised me.

What Genuinely Slows You Down?

Three things, in roughly descending order of pain.

Banking. Opening a corporate bank account takes weeks, sometimes months, and often requires an in-person visit with a stack of documents nobody tells you about in advance. Some banks won’t open accounts for newly registered companies at all — they want six months or more of operating history. I opened accounts at three different institutions before finding one that worked for us. Start this process on day one.

The invoice system (インボイス制度). If you’re a consumption tax payer dealing with freelancers or contractors, the 2023 reform added a significant layer of compliance overhead. You need to verify which suppliers are registered under the new system, collect their registration numbers, and reclassify older invoices. The administrative load compounds monthly. This is a big part of why we built Reshito — we were doing this manually for our own receipts and it was eating hours every quarter.

Trust takes time. Japanese B2B relationships are built on repeated interaction, not a single well-written pitch. A cold email or an out-of-the-blue LinkedIn message almost never converts to meaningful business. If you’re trying to sign enterprise clients, get good terms from a supplier, or bring on skilled contractors, you’re running a longer playbook than you might be used to. The upside: once the trust is established, those relationships are remarkably stable.

How Do You Actually Get Things Done Without Perfect Japanese?

Better than you’d think, with the right systems. Most of our day-to-day vendor communication runs through structured formats — quotes, maintenance requests, invoices — where the format itself does most of the work. When we need contractor quotes for property maintenance, we use Aimitsu, which we built specifically for this problem: it generates Japanese-language quote requests, collects bids, and surfaces a clear comparison without needing a bilingual operations manager on staff.

For tax and legal work, a bilingual 税理士 (tax accountant) is not optional — it’s infrastructure. Ours handles consumption tax filings, keeps us compliant with the minpaku framework, and catches issues before they become problems. The ¥120,000 or so per year this costs is the best money we spend.

What Would I Build Differently Today?

The products I’m most glad we built — Reshito for receipt and invoice management, Aimitsu for contractor quote comparison — both started as internal tools. We built them because we had the problem, not because we ran a market survey. That heuristic still holds. If you’re solving a real problem for yourself, you probably understand it better than anyone else in the room.

If I were starting over, I’d get the accountant and the bank account sorted in month one, not month six. I’d invest earlier in Japanese-language documentation for everything we do. And I’d resist the gravitational pull toward the English-speaking foreigner market as a first target — it’s comfortable, but it’s not where the real opportunity sits in Japan.

This post reflects my personal experience running BenStay LLC in Tokyo. This is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or business advice. Please consult a qualified professional for your specific situation.

FAQ

Q: Do I need to speak Japanese to run a company in Japan?

Fluency is not strictly required, but you need a reliable system. Most operational tasks can be handled with structured communication formats and good translation tooling. Where Japanese fluency actually matters is in relationships — with your accountant, your bank, and key clients. For those, either invest in learning or find a trusted bilingual partner or advisor early.

Q: What’s the difference between a 合同会社 (LLC) and a 株式会社 (KK) for a small tech startup?

A 合同会社 is cheaper to set up — no minimum capital requirement, lower registration fees — and has simpler governance. A 株式会社 carries more name recognition and is the standard structure for raising institutional investment. For a bootstrapped founder building in Japan, a 合同会社 is almost always the right starting point. We covered this in more depth in our LLC vs KK post.

Q: How long does it take to actually be operational after registering a company in Japan?

The registration itself takes about one to two weeks. The bottleneck is nearly always the corporate bank account, which can take one to three months depending on the bank and your situation. Budget three to four months from registration to fully operational — and start the bank account application as early as you possibly can.