Why we built this directory

Every founder we know who has started a company in Japan tells the same story. The support is real — startup visas, free government consultation desks, city-sponsored coworking, generous accelerator programs — but finding it means reading ministry PDFs, ward-office pages, and Japanese-language sites that don’t surface in an English search.

The resources are scattered because they come from everywhere: METI runs the visa program, each city runs its own support counter, JETRO handles market entry, and the community layer — meetups, job boards, women-founder networks — lives in a completely different corner of the internet.

So this site is a single index. Every entry is a real organisation we would point a friend to, described in one honest line, in English. No rankings, no sponsored placements, no “top 10” listicles.

It pairs with a weekly newsletter. Each Friday we send the new additions to the directory plus one short piece of analysis — what a policy change actually means, which programs are worth the paperwork. If you’re building in Japan, or thinking about it, that’s the email to get.