What to know before you brief a design or AI project.
I design, build and ship products from Tokyo, end to end. These are answers to the questions that actually come up when a company is deciding what to build and who to build it with.
Six Things a Japanese Company Misses Before Launching an App Overseas
What is normal practice in Japan can lead to lawsuits or demand letters in the US and the EU. Google Fonts loaded from Google, analytics with no consent banner, launch emails with no postal address, subscriptions that are hard to cancel. Six things to check before you launch an app or service for users abroad, with the primary sources.
September 30, 2026 · 1,039 words · overseas expansion · regulation · product development
87% of People With Worries Get No Support. What to Know Before You Build a Service for Loneliness
The latest Cabinet Office survey finds about 4 in 10 people in Japan feel lonely. Yet 87.0% of people with worries in daily life get no support from government or NPOs. The numbers and design principles companies and local governments should start from, drawn from building an AI companion app.
September 24, 2026 · 927 words · AI · product development · UX
Five Things to Check Before Dictation or an AI Assistant Goes on Company Macs
With dictation and AI assistants that read the screen, check what leaves the machine before you look at what it can do. The five rules I set when I built my own Mac assistant, written for companies deciding whether to allow them.
September 24, 2026 · 817 words · AI · adoption · security
Monitoring Tells You Something Went Wrong. Who Reads the Medicine Bag?
In 2020, 6.72 million people aged 65 or over lived alone in Japan. Most monitoring services are built to notice when something goes wrong, but the daily problems are smaller, like the print on a medicine bag or a letter from the ward office. What Glimpse, which we build ourselves, can do, how to introduce it to a parent, and what it cannot do.
September 24, 2026 · 878 words · Seniors · Monitoring · AI products
What to Decide Before Your Team Runs Coding Agents Overnight
Hand an agent a task before you leave, check the result in the morning. The approach is right, but sometimes nothing moved overnight. The cause is rarely the model. Usually the Mac went to sleep. Four things an unattended run needs, and what makes a tool easy to approve internally.
September 24, 2026 · 781 words · AI · development setup · adoption
If AI Can Make the Screens, Do You Still Need a Designer?
Screens and prototypes come out in seconds now. What is still worth paying for outside your company is not the making, it is the deciding. Here is what to look at when you choose.
September 18, 2026 · 740 words · AI · hiring · design
Is Monetization a Management Problem or a Design Problem
Management decides what you charge. Almost everything between the price existing and someone agreeing to it is design. Where the line sits, and the number to check before changing price.
August 20, 2026 · 572 words · product · management · UX
What Actually Gets Delivered When You Outsource Product Design
The most common question before a contract is signed is what gets delivered. There is a list of files, and it is the least valuable part. What you are buying is a set of decisions.
August 20, 2026 · 748 words · design · product · procurement
What Changes When Design and Development Are the Same Person
The gap between what was designed and what shipped is a real cost that appears in no quote. Where the losses happen, what disappears when one person holds both, and the size at which this is the wrong model.
August 20, 2026 · 647 words · design · engineering · team
Why Splitting Brand and Content Across Two Suppliers Stops Working
One company builds the brand, another writes the content. The most common arrangement in Japan, why it makes a brand unrecognisable within two years, and what it means now that AI answers are the front door.
August 20, 2026 · 632 words · design · marketing · websites
What to Check Before You Redesign Your Cancellation Flow
Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency built a fake subscription site and logged how 1,600 people actually cancelled. The stronger the obstruction, the fewer people got out. What the study found and what to check on your own screens.
August 19, 2026 · 1,049 words · cancellation · UX · product
What to Do Now About the JIS X 8341-3 Revision
Japan's web accessibility standard is being revised toward WCAG 2.2. That adds 26 success criteria, 11 of them at level AA. In a 2026 government survey, 21.7% of public bodies knew and were acting on it. What to do while it is still cheap.
August 19, 2026 · 968 words · accessibility · regulation · websites
Why Your Online Application Never Gets Finished
Japan's Digital Agency surveyed all 75,085 national administrative procedures, and the reasons application forms do not get completed are sitting in the results. Offline payment, paper attachments, and the fact that 40% of what counts as digitised is email.
August 19, 2026 · 943 words · forms · UX · operations
Getting ChatGPT and Claude to Describe Your Company Correctly
Enquiries now arrive via AI rather than search. A site written to be read by a model has slightly different requirements from one written to be read by a person. In priority order, what actually worked.
August 18, 2026 · 1,040 words · AI · websites · discovery
If You Keep Deferring Your Internal Tools, AI Will Not Stick Either
The 2026 white paper on information and communications reports 86.4% of Japanese companies using generative AI at work, and 27.0% reporting no organisational effort to change how work is done. In the United States that second figure is 1.4%. The gap has a lot to do with work being fixed in the shape of a screen.
August 18, 2026 · 966 words · internal tools · AI · adoption
What to Check Before You Move a Project to a New Agency
Enquiries often arrive while the relationship with the previous agency is deteriorating. Taking a project over is fine. Starting without checking a short list costs double the quote, and the extra is not rebuilding, it is investigation.
August 18, 2026 · 923 words · procurement · handover · partners
What to Measure to Know Whether the Design Work Worked
If you have not decided the metric before the work starts, you cannot decide it afterwards. Projects with retrofitted metrics end without anyone able to call them a success or a failure. What to measure, when to decide it, and what not to measure.
August 18, 2026 · 885 words · measurement · design · management
What to Put in the Internal Proposal So the Design Budget Gets Approved
A lot of projects stall after the quote goes back inside the company. The reason is almost never the number. It is that the approver has not been given anything they can decide on. Here is what the ones that got approved had in common.
August 18, 2026 · 922 words · procurement · budget · management
How to Decide What to Build When You Cannot Hire
METI's projection that Japan will be short 450,000 IT workers by 2030 appears in every proposal deck in the country. The same document says the gap closes entirely at 3.54% annual productivity growth. Almost nobody quotes that line.
August 12, 2026 · 1,280 words · team · product · process
If You Sell into the EU, Accessibility Became an Export Requirement in June 2025
The European Accessibility Act has applied across Member States since 28 June 2025. It covers anyone placing products or services on the EU market, wherever they are established. Here is the scope Japanese companies keep missing, and which exemptions actually buy time.
August 12, 2026 · 1,180 words · accessibility · going global · regulation
What to Do When There Is No Design Leader on Your Board
METI and the Japan Patent Office set two conditions for calling something design management. One of them is a board appointment, so it cannot move quickly. The other is about the order of your meetings, and you can change that next week.
August 12, 2026 · 1,081 words · team · design · management
Why Your System Replacement Made Everyone Angry
Seven years after the 2025 Digital Cliff, modernisation in Japan has plateaued, and companies themselves do not name legacy systems as their main obstacle to DX. The reason replacement projects are resented on the ground is probably not in the system.
August 12, 2026 · 1,114 words · redesign · process · product
You Bought the AI Tool and Nobody Uses It
Licences paid for, accounts handed out, and still nothing to report to the board. Read the international comparisons carefully and Japan is not behind on usage. It is behind on one line only: whether the tool is built into how the work runs.
August 12, 2026 · 1,051 words · AI · adoption · product
Building Product When You Have No Designer In House
Hiring one in Japan is slow and competitive. Here is what you can do without a designer, what genuinely has to be internal, and why it is not the role you think.
August 11, 2026 · 677 words · team · hiring · product
How Far Accessibility Work Should Actually Go
Passing an audit and being usable are two different jobs. The legal position in Japan, the four checks worth doing first, and why retrofitting costs so much more than building it in.
August 11, 2026 · 678 words · accessibility · quality · design
How to Choose a Design Partner
Portfolios and proposals tell you about capability. They tell you almost nothing about fit. Five questions to ask before you sign, and what the way they answer reveals.
August 11, 2026 · 727 words · procurement · partners · design
The Four Things to Write Down Before You Ask for Quotes
You do not need a formal RFP. Four things on one page narrows the spread between quotes, reduces rework during the project, and settles internal disagreement before it becomes expensive.
August 11, 2026 · 640 words · procurement · RFP · process
Using Japan's AI Adoption Subsidies Without Wasting Them
The digitalisation and AI adoption subsidy, and the reskilling course of the human resources development subsidy. What is available, and what has to be decided before you apply.
August 11, 2026 · 649 words · subsidies · AI · adoption
What Decides the Cost of a UI and UX Design Project
Send the same brief to five studios and the quotes come back several times apart. That gap is not pricing games. It is a disagreement about what you actually asked for.
August 11, 2026 · 710 words · pricing · outsourcing · design
What Goes Wrong When You Build an English Version of Your Site
The translation is usually fine. The structure is not. Why translating a Japanese page in place produces a page that nobody contacts, and what to do instead.
August 11, 2026 · 649 words · localisation · going global · websites
When a Design System Is Actually Worth Building
Build it too early and nobody uses it. Build it too late and the migration never finishes. Three conditions that tell you it is time, and the smallest useful first version.
August 11, 2026 · 611 words · design systems · team · engineering
Where to Start Improving an Existing App
A full rebuild is expensive and hard to reverse. How to find where you are actually losing people, the four fixes that work almost everywhere, and when a rebuild is genuinely the answer.
August 11, 2026 · 621 words · UX · redesign · product
Why Your AI Proof of Concept Never Became a Product
Japanese large companies adopt AI at 87%, on par with the United States. Only 9% say the results beat expectations. That gap is not technical, and it opens at a predictable point.
August 11, 2026 · 775 words · AI · proof of concept · product
Nothing matches that.