Your buyer lands on your product page from a mobile browser on the Yamanote line. The Japanese web font hasn't loaded yet — your LCP stalls past 4 seconds. Google Japan's crawler tokenized your headline wrong because your agency treated CJK text as a translation problem, not a rendering one. Your bilingual site has duplicate content penalties because the /ja/ and /en/ paths share the same canonical tag. We don't have a Tokyo office. Our studios are in London and LA. But your morning is our LA team's afternoon — we schedule live sessions in that overlap window and ship deliverables before your first coffee. What we bring is Next.js and Astro engineering tested against real Japanese content, not lorem ipsum with kanji dropped in. Font subsetting for Noto Sans JP. Kinsoku shori line-break rules in every component. Hreflang architecture that doesn't cannibalize your rankings. If your current agency ships broken OG images with garbled kanji or ignores how Google Japan tokenizes differently, that's the gap your business is bleeding revenue through.
프로젝트가 실패하는 이유
우리가 만드는 것
Ship Japanese web fonts without tanking your LCP score below 2.5 seconds
Render multi-byte characters correctly across every browser and viewport size
Build bilingual content paths that don't trigger duplicate content penalties
Handle CJK tokenization the way Google Japan's algorithm actually parses it
Test dense product layouts against real Tokyo ecommerce buyer behavior patterns
Deliver in JST-overlap windows so your feedback doesn't wait 14 hours
우리의 프로세스
Scope and audit
Architecture and prototyping
Build sprint
QA and localization review
Launch and monitoring
자주 묻는 질문
Do you have an office in Tokyo?
No. Our studios are in London (HQ) and Los Angeles. We don't have a physical presence in Tokyo and we won't pretend otherwise. What we do have is a deliberate remote delivery process built for JST overlap. Our LA team's afternoon (1–6 PM PST) maps to your Tokyo morning (6–11 AM JST). We run async handoffs through that window and schedule live calls there. We've shipped production sites for Tokyo-based clients this way, and the feedback cycle is tighter than most people expect from a non-local agency.
How does the JST timezone overlap actually work day-to-day?
Our LA studio's working afternoon overlaps with Tokyo's morning. That gives us a 4–5 hour live window every weekday for calls, screen shares, and real-time code reviews. Outside that window, we work async — you'll get a written update with screenshots or Loom recordings before your day starts. Our London team adds a second overlap window in the early JST evening if needed. It's not the same as sitting in the same room, but for code-heavy projects, async often works better anyway.
Can you build sites with Japanese content from day one?
Yes, and we insist on it. One of the biggest mistakes we see is agencies building with English placeholder content and dropping in Japanese text at the end. Japanese characters have different pixel widths, different line-break rules (kinsoku shori), and different font loading characteristics. If you don't design and test with real Japanese content from the start, you end up with broken layouts at launch. We integrate your Japanese copy into component builds starting in week two.
How do you handle Japanese web font performance?
CJK font files are massive — Noto Sans JP can be 4MB+ unsubsetted. We use unicode-range subsetting to load only the character sets each page needs, combine that with font-display: swap and preload hints for above-the-fold text, and test LCP specifically with Japanese heading content. The goal is Lighthouse 95+ on mobile with real Japanese fonts rendered, not with system fallbacks hiding the problem.
Do you handle bilingual Japanese/English site structures?
That's one of the most common briefs we get from Tokyo clients. We set up proper /ja/ and /en/ path structures with correct hreflang annotations, separate sitemaps per language, and canonical tags that prevent Google from treating your English and Japanese pages as duplicates. We also make sure structured data (JSON-LD) is generated in the correct language per path — a detail most agencies miss that affects rich snippet eligibility in Google Japan.
What's a typical project cost for a Tokyo-based client?
Most projects fall between ¥1.5M and ¥30M depending on scope. A bilingual marketing site for a B2B SaaS company is usually in the ¥3M–¥8M range. A full ecommerce build with Japanese-character SEO, performance engineering, and CMS integration runs ¥8M–¥20M. We scope everything in writing before work starts — no ambiguous estimates. We invoice in GBP or USD from our London entity, but we're happy to quote in JPY for budgeting purposes.
Let's build
something together.
Whether it's a migration, a new build, or an SEO challenge — the Social Animal team would love to hear from you.