Quick Answers
Why isn't our SOC 2 report enough for a Japanese enterprise customer?
Because the two documents answer different questions. A SOC 2 report is an assurance report written by a CPA firm about the controls you chose to describe, on a scope you set. The spreadsheet is the customer's own control list, and the reviewer has to record a status against each row before their internal request can be filed. Nobody there is doubting your auditor. They simply cannot cite your report in the cell that wants an implementation status and a description.
Can we answer it in English?
You can, and it will usually be accepted as an interim answer while somebody translates it. That somebody is either your champion, working evenings on wording about your own encryption and subprocessors that they then attest to internally, or a supplier they have to procure first. The completed sheet is going into an approval package that circulates in Japanese, so the Japanese version is not optional. The only open question is who produces it and how many weeks that takes.

TL;DR

The commercial part of the deal is finished. Then a workbook arrives from the customer's information systems or security department and everything stops for a month or two while it travels back and forth. This is rarely a security problem and almost never a deal problem. Three things are happening at once: the reviewer needs a status per row rather than an auditor's conclusion; the completed sheet is an attachment to an internal approval request, so it has to be in Japanese to be usable at all; and the person who actually knows the answer to row 147 sits at your headquarters, several time zones away, translating between your vocabulary and the sheet's. Each round trip costs about a week. The way out is to fill the sheet in properly once, in Japanese, keep it as an internal asset with a version number, and answer the next customer by editing the differences.

Key Takeaways

"We Just Need You to Fill This In"

The email arrives on a Thursday afternoon Japan time. It is three sentences long and entirely pleasant. Attached is a file called 情報セキュリティチェックシート.xlsx, and the note explains that the information systems department has to complete a vendor assessment before the purchase goes to its final approval step.

You open it. Four tabs. The first is company details. The second starts at row 12 and runs past row 200: organisational policy, access control, encryption at rest and in transit, log retention periods, subcontractor management, cross-border data transfer, incident notification timelines, personnel background checks, physical access to the data centre, secure disposal of media. Three narrow columns sit at the right of every row — 対応状況 (implemented / partially / not implemented / not applicable), 具体的な対応内容 (describe what you actually do), 根拠資料 (name the evidence).

Nothing in it is unreasonable. Most of it is already true of your product. And there is no obvious way to say so.

That sequence is a composite of a pattern I see repeatedly in Japan-entry work. It is not a description of a specific client or a specific customer.

Your Certificate Answers a Question They Did Not Ask

The instinct at headquarters is to reply with what already exists: the SOC 2 Type II report, the ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, a link to the trust page, and an offer of a call with the security team. That reply is not wrong. In several markets it ends the conversation. In Japan it usually produces a courteous acknowledgement and the same spreadsheet again, sometimes with a gentle note asking for the sheet itself.

The mismatch is structural rather than cultural. The AICPA describes its SOC offerings as assurance reports that give users information needed "to assess and address the risks associated with outsourcing services" — a report from a CPA firm, on a system description and a scope you defined, expressing an opinion. The sheet is the opposite kind of artefact. It is the customer's own list of controls, written by their security function for their own governance, and the reviewer has to put a status against each line and then put their name under it.

Certification runs into the same gap. In Japan the reference point for ISO/IEC 27001 is generally JIS Q 27001 and the ISMS conformity assessment scheme, under which a certification body accredited by ISMS-AC certifies that an organisation has implemented and operates an information security management system to that standard. That is a statement about your management system inside a declared scope. It says nothing about whether audit logs are retained for the number of months named on row 88.

The distinction that saves you a month: your report and your certificate belong in the evidence column, not in the answer column. Reviewers will happily cite them — once somebody has told them which section of which document supports which row.

Why the Sheet Has to Be in Japanese

The completed workbook does not stay with the person who sent it. It gets attached to an internal request and travels up the approval chain — the same ringi route the rest of the purchase follows — and it is read by people who had nothing to do with evaluating your product. The information systems reviewer signs the security section. Their manager signs. Legal often reads the subcontractor and cross-border transfer rows. At a bank or a payments company, a risk or internal audit function reads it as well.

None of those readers volunteered for this, and an English attachment gives every one of them a reason to send it back. This is the part that is easy to miss from headquarters: the sheet is a form, and a form filled in in the wrong language is not a good answer awaiting translation. Procedurally it is an incomplete form.

There is a vocabulary problem underneath the language problem. Japanese enterprise security questionnaires are assembled from a domestic vocabulary that has hardened over two decades of public guidance. IPA publishes the 情報セキュリティ対策ベンチマーク, a self-assessment tool of 25 questions through which an organisation grades its own management practice. The appendices to IPA's security guideline for smaller companies arrive as a self-diagnosis checklist and an Excel asset register — the item table and the workbook are the native form here, not an improvisation by your customer. And if you sell to financial institutions, the relevant reference is the FISC standard for computer system safety measures, whose fourteenth edition was published in March 2026.

Customers do not invent their sheets. They build them out of that vocabulary. An answer written in the terms of your own security programme has to be mapped onto it before it registers as an answer at all, and mapping is exactly the work nobody has been assigned.

Where the Weeks Actually Go

Ask afterwards why it took two months and you will be told the security review took a while. That is true and explains nothing. Very little of the time goes on assessing anything. It goes on round trips, and round trips have a fixed rhythm.

The person who can answer row 147 is at your headquarters — a security engineer, or whoever owns the compliance mailbox. They are eight to sixteen hours behind Tokyo and this is not their main job. A question goes over at the end of the Japanese day, an answer comes back the following morning, and the clarification it prompts goes out that evening. Two or three exchanges of that shape and a week is gone.

Then the answer has to be written into the sheet, which is its own translation problem. "We retain logs for 12 months" has to land in a cell whose column header assumes there is a named retention policy document and asks which one. So the workbook goes back with three cells filled and two flagged, the reviewer adds a comment in the margin, and the cycle starts again.

Four exchanges is common. Eight weeks is not unusual. Those are observations from watching the pattern repeat, not a measured statistic, and the number is not the point. The point is that the cost scales with the number of round trips and with almost nothing else. Halve the round trips and you halve the delay, whatever your own baseline turns out to be.

Fill It In Once. Properly. In Japanese.

The second sheet you receive will not be identical to the first. It will ask most of the same things in a different order, under different column headings, with one or two items the first customer never raised. That similarity is the whole opportunity, and almost nobody takes it, because the first sheet gets treated as an interruption and the file is forgotten in a sales folder the day the contract is signed.

What to build instead, while you are answering the first one anyway:

  1. One Japanese source document, not a returned attachment. Each question, the Japanese answer, and the English text it came from, side by side, so headquarters can review what is being said in their name and Japan can send it without waiting.
  2. An evidence pointer on every answer. Which section of the SOC 2 report, which policy, which page of the certificate scope. This is the part that actually removes the round trips, because it turns "can you show us" into a reference you already wrote down.
  3. A written record of every row you could not answer yes to. These are worth more than the ones you could. They are a list of what Japanese enterprise buyers will keep asking for, arriving free of charge.
  4. Wording checked by someone who reads both sides. Your security documentation and the sheet's vocabulary are two different registers, and the mapping between them is a judgement call made row by row.
  5. An owner who works Japanese hours. Somebody who can return a marked-up sheet the same day rather than the following week is worth more here than any amount of documentation.

None of this requires a compliance programme you do not already have. It requires treating the answer set as an asset with a version number instead of an email attachment rewritten from scratch every time. The neighbouring documents benefit too: the security and data-handling page and the terms and privacy policy get cited from the evidence column constantly, and the corporate details a vendor registration form demands tend to be requested in the same week.

Four Ways to Make It Worse

Machine-translating the sheet and sending it straight back. Fine for reading the questions. Poor for the answers, which circulate with your company name at the top. A reviewer who meets Japanese that reads like machine output in a security response starts wondering what else was done at speed, and that suspicion is expensive to undo.

Letting the sales team fill it in to keep momentum. A wrong answer in a security sheet is worse than a slow one. It does not surface during the deal. It surfaces at renewal, or during an incident, in a document somebody on the customer side signed.

Leaving cells blank. A blank is not neutral. It is a question the reviewer now has to ask you, at the cost of another round trip. 該当なし with one line of reason is something they can file.

Treating "partial" as a failure. The column exists because no vendor satisfies every row. A truthful partial with a stated plan clears review more reliably than an optimistic yes, and it does not come back a year later.

What the Spreadsheet Is Actually Telling You

A security questionnaire is not an obstacle placed in front of the contract. It is the moment the customer starts handling you as a supplier rather than a candidate. The sheet exists because someone inside that company has to be personally accountable for the decision, and in Japan the sheet is how accountability gets recorded.

Which also means it will happen again. With the second customer, and the fifth. At renewal, when the customer reissues the sheet because their own standards were revised. And in the weeks before the fiscal year closes, when everything else is competing for the same approvers. Companies that treat each sheet as a fresh emergency spend those two months every single time.

If your Japan pipeline has deals parked in a stage called something like security review, look at what is physically moving between the two sides. If it is a spreadsheet, and it crosses the Pacific about once a week, the constraint is not your security posture and never was.

A Japan Readiness Check reads your Japanese-facing material the way an internal reviewer does — the security and data-handling page, the terms, the corporate information a vendor registration asks for — and shows where a customer's own approval process runs out of things it can cite.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is our SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate not enough for a Japanese enterprise customer?

Because the customer is not asking for an auditor's conclusion. They are asking for a status against each row of their own control list, because that is what their internal approval process records. A SOC 2 report is an assurance report you commissioned and scoped; an ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, read in Japan against JIS Q 27001 and the ISMS conformity assessment scheme, attests that your management system was certified within a declared scope. Both are useful in the evidence column and reviewers will cite them there. Neither can be pasted into the cell where their form wants an implementation status and a description of what you actually do.

Can we answer a Japanese security questionnaire in English?

You can send it, and it will usually be accepted as an interim answer. It will not close the review, because the completed workbook becomes an attachment to an internal approval request that circulates in Japanese among people who were not part of your evaluation. Somebody has to produce a Japanese version before that request can be filed. If you do not, your champion does it in the evening, and then they are the one vouching for wording about your encryption and your subprocessors that they did not write.

How long does a Japanese security questionnaire normally take?

Long enough to matter, and the length is driven by round trips rather than by the assessment itself. Each exchange tends to cost about a week: the person who can answer a specific row sits at headquarters in another time zone, the answer has to be rendered into the vocabulary the sheet uses, and the rendering raises a follow-up question. Four exchanges is common and two months is not unusual. That is an observed pattern in Japan-entry work rather than a measured average, and the practical reading is simple: reduce the number of round trips and the delay reduces with it.

Should we prepare a standard Japanese answer set before a customer asks?

If you intend to sell to Japanese enterprises, yes, and the cheapest moment to build it is while answering the first real sheet. Keep one Japanese source document holding each answer, the English text it came from, and a pointer to the supporting evidence: the section of the SOC 2 report, the policy document, the scope statement on the certificate. Later sheets ask most of the same things in a different order with different column headings, so the second one becomes an editing job rather than a project.

What if we have to answer no to some of the rows?

Answer no, with a reason and, where there is one, a plan and a date. Most Japanese security sheets carry a partial or not-applicable column precisely because no vendor satisfies every row, and reviewers are looking for something they can defend internally rather than a perfect score. A blank cell is worse than a no, because it becomes a question that costs another round trip. An optimistic yes is worse still, because it gets verified eventually, sometimes at renewal and sometimes during an incident.