The First Reply:
How Japanese Buyers Read a Foreign Vendor's Business Email

TL;DR

Assume your first reply will be forwarded. Give it a subject line that names both companies and the topic, open with a correct address line (company, department, full name, 様), use the set phrases a Japanese reader expects, and keep the keigo at a steady, ordinary level. Close with a signature that shows who you are and where you are, acknowledge the inquiry on the same business day in Japan, and offer two or three meeting slots in Japan time with a one-page overview in Japanese.

Key Takeaways

• Write for the person they forward it to. The subject and the first two lines should explain the email without the thread above it.
• The address line is checked first. Company, department and full name with 様. A wrong kanji or a missing honorific is noticed before anything else.
• Set phrases are signals, not decoration. Readers skim past them, but they notice when they are missing or misplaced.
• Machine translation shows in a few predictable places. あなた, literal openers, long chains of katakana and exclamation marks.
• Make the next step concrete. Two or three dated slots in Japan time, the length of the call, and one page in Japanese they can forward.

Your Reply Will Be Forwarded

The person who fills in a contact form at a Japanese company is often not the person who decides. They may have been asked to look into tools in your category, or they may have found you themselves and need to show their manager before going further. Either way, one of the first things they do with your reply is share it. A purchase will later need a written approval that passes through several people, which we describe in Getting Through Japanese Procurement: Ringi, Invoicing, and the Paper Trail; your first email is often the first document in that file.

That changes what a good reply looks like. An email that only works as an answer to the inquiry — "Thanks for reaching out! Happy to chat, here's my calendar link" — means nothing to the manager it is forwarded to. An email that states who you are, what was asked and what you propose can be passed on without a covering note.

Start with the subject line. If they wrote to you by email, keep their subject and reply on the thread. If the inquiry came through a form, write a subject that stands on its own and names the topic and your company:

Then make the first lines of the body do the same work: thank them for the inquiry and restate what they asked about, in one sentence.

The Address Line Is Read Before the Message

A Japanese business email opens with the recipient's company, department and name, each on its own line, before any greeting. For a first reply, write them in full, exactly as they appear in the inquiry or the sender's signature:

A few details matter more than they look. 様 (sama) follows the full name; さん is for colleagues and people you already know, not for a customer you have never met. When there is no named person, the company or department takes 御中 (onchū) instead, and 御中 and 様 are not used together. In the body, refer to the person by family name with 様 — 山田様 — rather than "Taro". And check the kanji of their name and company against their own email. A wrong character in a name is the error Japanese readers notice first, and the one they find hardest to overlook.

If colleagues are copied on their email, many Japanese writers add them to the address block as well, for example a line reading （CC：同部 佐藤様）. It tells everyone at a glance who else is reading.

What the Set Phrases Are Doing

Japanese business email has fixed openings and closings, and they carry less meaning than their English translations suggest. They are there to mark the email as a proper business message. Readers skim past them, and notice only when they are missing.

For a reply to an inbound inquiry, a natural opening thanks them for the inquiry and introduces you:

From the second email onward, the usual opener becomes お世話になっております — roughly "thank you for your continued support", although no one reads it that literally. The usual close is 何卒よろしくお願いいたします or 引き続きよろしくお願いいたします, which has no real English equivalent; it asks for the reader's goodwill in what comes next. Leave it out and the email ends abruptly, as if you had hung up mid-sentence.

Write your own name the way you want it read. A katakana rendering with the Latin spelling in brackets, ジョン・スミス（John Smith）, lets the reader say your name correctly in a meeting and search for you in their inbox.

How Much Keigo Is Enough

Keigo can go wrong in both directions. Too little, and the email sounds careless: 了解しました to a customer, or plain-form sentences that end in だ. Too much, and it sounds anxious or automated: させていただきます in every sentence, or doubled honorifics such as おっしゃられる and 拝見させていただきます, which a careful reader will notice as overcorrection.

The target is a steady, ordinary level: です and ます throughout, 承知いたしました for "understood", ご確認ください or ご確認いただけますでしょうか for requests, and 弊社 for your company and 貴社 for theirs. The same tension between polite and plain Japanese shows up in product copy, as we discuss in Keigo or Plain Form? Japanese Politeness for SaaS Products.

Where Machine Translation Shows

Japanese readers are good at spotting emails that were written in English and translated by software. The giveaways cluster in a few places:

• Translated openers. "I hope this email finds you well" has no Japanese counterpart. Translated literally, it reads as an odd wish about the email's journey. Delete it and use the thank-you opening above.
• あなた (anata). Japanese business email almost never addresses the reader as "you". Use the person's name with 様, or 貴社 for their company.
• Katakana chains. A sentence like シームレスなインテグレーションでユーザーエクスペリエンスをエンハンス is technically Japanese, but no one would write it. Keep the katakana for product names and terms your reader already uses.
• English punctuation and tone. Exclamation marks, "Great question!" and emoji read as casual, or as a template, in a first business email.
• Direct requests translated word for word. "Let me know your thoughts" becomes something close to "tell me your opinion". ご意見をお聞かせいただけますと幸いです is what a Japanese writer would put.

We go through these patterns in more detail in Your Japanese Is Correct. That's Not the Problem..

The Signature Is Part of the Answer

When a manager receives a forwarded email from a vendor they have never heard of, the signature is where they check whether you are real. A Japanese business signature usually carries the company name, department and title, your name, a postal address, a phone number, an email address and a website.

If you have a Japanese entity, use its Japanese name. If you do not have an office in Japan, give your headquarters address and the hours during which you answer in Japan time; leaving the address out looks like you have something to hide. Put a Japanese-language page on the website line if one exists. Keep legal disclaimers short — a long English confidentiality notice at the bottom is one more thing that marks the email as foreign.

CC and BCC: Say Who Is Reading

If the inquirer copied colleagues, reply to everyone. If you add someone from your side — your CEO, a solutions engineer, a Japanese partner — say so in the body rather than letting the name appear without explanation:

Note that your own colleague is referred to by family name only, without さん or 様, when writing to a customer. When you move someone to BCC, say that too. And never put several customers in the same CC line.

Speed: Acknowledge First, Answer Second

Japanese business correspondence values a prompt acknowledgement. If you cannot answer the question properly within the working day, send a short note that says when you will:

Then keep the date. The time difference is usually the problem here: an inquiry sent at ten in the morning in Tokyo arrives in the middle of the night in Europe or the evening before on the US West Coast. Japan uses Japan Standard Time (UTC+9) all year, with no daylight saving time, so the gap shifts twice a year on your side and never on theirs. An English-only auto-reply does not count as an acknowledgement; it tells the reader no one has read their message yet.

Make the Next Step Easy to Accept

Avoid ending with "When works for you?" or a booking link on its own. A Japanese contact often has to check with others before accepting a meeting, and a specific proposal is easier to forward. Offer two or three slots, with dates, days of the week and times in Japan time, and say how long the call will be and who will join:

Attach one page in Japanese: what the product does, who uses it, how it is priced and what happens in the first meeting. An English pitch deck is what you would send at home; in Japan the contact has to summarise it for their manager anyway, and a one-page summary in Japanese lets them simply forward it. Booking links are fine as an extra, offered after the dated slots rather than in their place.

A First Reply, Assembled

Put together, a first reply to a Japanese inquiry might read like this:

In English: "Thank you very much for your inquiry about our payment API. My name is John Smith, and I look after the Japanese market at Acme Payments. I have attached a one-page overview of our support for the domestic card brands you asked about, for use in your internal discussions. Could we have about 45 minutes online to go through the details? Would any of the following times suit you (all Japan time)? If none of them works, please let me know a few dates and I will arrange around them. Thank you in advance." The signature follows.

Nothing in it is clever. It is short, it says what was asked and what happens next, and a manager who receives it forwarded can understand it without reading anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions