Business Japanese for Startup Founders: Pitching and Investor Meetings

How much Japanese a founder actually needs

Be honest about your audience. If you are raising from investors who regularly back foreign founders, the meeting may be in English and your Japanese will be a courtesy that opens and closes it. If you are selling to Japanese companies, partnering with a regional firm, applying to a government or municipal programme, opening a bank account for the company or hiring your first Japanese employee, the meeting will be in Japanese and your ability to hold your own in it is part of the pitch. Most founders need the second kind of Japanese sooner than they expect.

The target is not fluency. It is to open the meeting, present the business in three or four plain sentences, follow the questions, answer the ones you can, buy time on the ones you cannot, and close with a next step, all in Japanese, with a bilingual colleague or interpreter for the detail. The lines below are the spirit of it.

The pitch in four lines

A spoken pitch in a second language should be short enough to deliver without notes and clear enough to survive your accent. Four moves cover it: direct attention to the deck, state the one fact about the market, invite questions, and ask for consideration. Everything else lives in the deck or in your answers. The picture cards give you the four lines; the vocabulary that follows is what the deck and the conversation will need.

The first five minutes: cards, names and seats

A first business meeting in Japan opens with a ritual that takes two minutes and sets the tone for the next hour. You exchange business cards, meishi, standing, each person offering their card with both hands and a slight bow while saying their company and name, and receiving the other's card with both hands and a moment of attention. Cards stay on the table during the meeting, arranged in front of you, and never go into a back pocket. The guest is usually shown to the seat furthest from the door; wait to be invited to sit.

Your self-introduction uses humble forms for yourself and your company. Mōsu is the humble to be called; heisha is our company; daihyō is the representative director, the usual title of a founder-CEO.

Sasete itadakimasu, literally I humbly receive permission to do, is the standard formal way to announce what you are about to do in a meeting. It sounds heavy in English and perfectly normal in Japanese.

What investors and partners ask, and how to answer

The questions in a Japanese investor meeting are the same as anywhere: the team, the market, the competition, the numbers, the ask. What differs is that they may arrive more indirectly, and that an answer that admits uncertainty and promises a written follow-up is respected rather than penalised. Prepare one simple answer to each of the questions below, and prepare the buying-time line for everything else.

The last line is the most valuable sentence in the guide. Guessing a number in a second language is how founders lose trust; promising a written answer and delivering it the next morning is how they gain it.

Partners and customers: the meeting outside the startup bubble

Partner and customer meetings, with a distributor, a manufacturer, a regional retailer or a corporate buyer, are where Japanese matters most, because these counterparts often do not work in English and because the relationship is being judged as much as the product. The pace is slower, the first meeting may produce no decision, and the words for proposing cooperation are deliberately soft: kangaete orimasu, we are considering, rather than we want.

Shanai de kentō shimasu, we will consider it internally, is a real next step in Japan, not a polite refusal. Your job is to make the next date concrete before you leave the room.

Follow-up: the next-day message

Follow up within a day, by email or the messaging tool the other side uses. The structure is fixed: thanks for the time, one sentence recalling what was discussed, the material or answer you promised, a proposed next step, and a closing formula. Here are the spoken-register equivalents, which also work when you call to confirm. Written business Japanese adds set phrases at the top and bottom; a bilingual colleague can polish those, but the content is yours.

Register mistakes that founders make

• Watashi no kaisha instead of heisha, and anata no kaisha instead of onsha. The humble and honorific pair is the first thing a Japanese listener notices.
• Boku or ore for I. In a business meeting it is watashi, or watakushi if you want to be very formal.
• Omoimasu for every opinion. In a formal pitch, kangaete orimasu, we consider, carries more weight for plans and intentions.
• Answering a hard question with a guess. Kakunin shite, aratamete gokaitō itashimasu, then follow up in writing.
• Treating kentō shimasu as a no. It usually means the discussion is going internal; propose a date for the next step.
• Skipping the small talk. The weather, the office, the journey: two sentences before the deck is not wasted time in Japan, it is the meeting starting.