I came to Japan to localize software. The problem was never translation.
Roy Husada
Founder & CEO
I moved to Japan in 2015. At the time, UX was still a young discipline here, and that gave me a way in. I had spent years as a designer, then an art director, then a creative director, and I could see that the methods we used to design products could also be used to solve a different problem that kept appearing in front of me. The problem of taking something built for one market and making it work in another.
I started applying design thinking and rapid prototyping to localization. Instead of translating copy and hoping, we would build quickly, test with real Japanese users, and validate the product design, the words, and the brand communication together. It worked better than translation did. And in the process it taught me something I did not expect. The hardest part of making a global brand work in Japan is almost never the language.
The difficulty is real, and it is measured
For a long time I assumed the friction I saw was partly in my head. Then I came across the US Foreign Service Institute’s ranking of languages by difficulty for English speakers. They train diplomats, so they have reason to measure this precisely. Japanese sits in the hardest category. That was useful to me, because it meant the thing foreign companies feel when they try to operate here is not a vague complaint. It is evidence.
But the ranking is about language, and the mistake most companies make is to stop there. They assume that if they solve the language, they solve Japan. So they translate the site, hire a bilingual person, and wait for the market to respond the way it did at home. It usually does not.
Language is the visible part of a larger gap
Japanese is not only a language. It is customs, context, and a set of expectations about what is normal. This is an island nation that is unusually sensitive to small variations in what counts as normal, and the distance between a global team’s sense of normal and a Japanese customer’s sense of normal is often much larger than the global team realises.
I saw this again and again across the platforms and brands I worked with. Policy built with real care, for a different user in a different context. Advertising standards shaped by genuine expertise that did not extend to a market with its own visual history. Features that landed differently than anyone expected because the signals used to measure success did not translate. None of these were failures of effort. They were failures of context, and context does not fit in a translation memory.
The book that gave me the language for it
Years ago I read Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap. As a designer, it helped me put words to something I had felt but could not explain, which is that brand is not decoration. It is a business function, and the gap between what a company intends and what it actually delivers is where value is won or lost.
What I eventually understood is that in Japan, that gap is not closed by better creative or better translation. It is closed by better operations. By deciding who makes brand decisions, by building systems the local team and outside partners can actually use, and by keeping those systems alive between projects. The creative matters. But without the operating layer underneath it, good creative drifts, and a strong global brand slowly turns into a weaker local one.
Why this became a company
This is the reason Rare Standard exists, and the reason we describe ourselves as a brand operations partner rather than a studio. A studio makes the asset. We build the system that makes every asset consistent, in a market that does not run on the same defaults as headquarters.
I did not set out to start a company around this idea. I set out to localize software. The company is what happened once I understood that the real work was not in the words on the screen. It was in the hundreds of small decisions behind them, and in whether anyone had built a way to make those decisions well, again and again, without starting from zero each time.
Japan is not difficult in the way people mean when they say it. It is different, and different is specific. It tells you exactly where the work is. For us, the work turned out to be operational. It usually is.
If your Japan strategy currently lives in a translated deck and a few trusted individuals, that is worth looking at closely. The gap is rarely where people expect to find it.
I came to Japan to localize software. The problem was never translation.
Roy Husada
Founder & CEO
I moved to Japan in 2015. At the time, UX was still a young discipline here, and that gave me a way in. I had spent years as a designer, then an art director, then a creative director, and I could see that the methods we used to design products could also be used to solve a different problem that kept appearing in front of me. The problem of taking something built for one market and making it work in another.
I started applying design thinking and rapid prototyping to localization. Instead of translating copy and hoping, we would build quickly, test with real Japanese users, and validate the product design, the words, and the brand communication together. It worked better than translation did. And in the process it taught me something I did not expect. The hardest part of making a global brand work in Japan is almost never the language.
The difficulty is real, and it is measured
For a long time I assumed the friction I saw was partly in my head. Then I came across the US Foreign Service Institute’s ranking of languages by difficulty for English speakers. They train diplomats, so they have reason to measure this precisely. Japanese sits in the hardest category. That was useful to me, because it meant the thing foreign companies feel when they try to operate here is not a vague complaint. It is evidence.
But the ranking is about language, and the mistake most companies make is to stop there. They assume that if they solve the language, they solve Japan. So they translate the site, hire a bilingual person, and wait for the market to respond the way it did at home. It usually does not.
Language is the visible part of a larger gap
Japanese is not only a language. It is customs, context, and a set of expectations about what is normal. This is an island nation that is unusually sensitive to small variations in what counts as normal, and the distance between a global team’s sense of normal and a Japanese customer’s sense of normal is often much larger than the global team realises.
I saw this again and again across the platforms and brands I worked with. Policy built with real care, for a different user in a different context. Advertising standards shaped by genuine expertise that did not extend to a market with its own visual history. Features that landed differently than anyone expected because the signals used to measure success did not translate. None of these were failures of effort. They were failures of context, and context does not fit in a translation memory.
The book that gave me the language for it
Years ago I read Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap. As a designer, it helped me put words to something I had felt but could not explain, which is that brand is not decoration. It is a business function, and the gap between what a company intends and what it actually delivers is where value is won or lost.
What I eventually understood is that in Japan, that gap is not closed by better creative or better translation. It is closed by better operations. By deciding who makes brand decisions, by building systems the local team and outside partners can actually use, and by keeping those systems alive between projects. The creative matters. But without the operating layer underneath it, good creative drifts, and a strong global brand slowly turns into a weaker local one.
Why this became a company
This is the reason Rare Standard exists, and the reason we describe ourselves as a brand operations partner rather than a studio. A studio makes the asset. We build the system that makes every asset consistent, in a market that does not run on the same defaults as headquarters.
I did not set out to start a company around this idea. I set out to localize software. The company is what happened once I understood that the real work was not in the words on the screen. It was in the hundreds of small decisions behind them, and in whether anyone had built a way to make those decisions well, again and again, without starting from zero each time.
Japan is not difficult in the way people mean when they say it. It is different, and different is specific. It tells you exactly where the work is. For us, the work turned out to be operational. It usually is.
If your Japan strategy currently lives in a translated deck and a few trusted individuals, that is worth looking at closely. The gap is rarely where people expect to find it.