Your Tokyo CMS is Choking on Japanese Characters Again

No. Our studios are in London (HQ) and Los Angeles. We've shipped headless CMS projects for Tokyo-based clients entirely through remote delivery. Our LA team's working hours overlap with JST mornings -- typically 9:00-13:00 JST -- which gives us a solid daily sync window. The rest runs async: structured Slack channels, Loom walkthroughs, and bilingual documentation. Headless CMS work is architecture- and API-heavy, which maps well to remote collaboration. We won't pretend we're local, but we will be responsive and structured.

Our LA studio operates on Pacific Time, which gives us a 9:00-13:00 JST overlap window every weekday. We schedule standups, review sessions, and stakeholder calls in that window. Outside of it, we use async updates -- recorded demos, written briefs, and pull request reviews -- so your team in Tokyo never waits a full day for a response. Our London team adds a second overlap window in your late afternoon if needed.

Yes, and this is a bigger deal than most agencies realize. Japanese input via IME behaves differently from Latin typing -- composition events, character conversion, and string length all need specific handling. We build custom input components that respect IME composition, validate Japanese string lengths properly, and render preview text with correct CJK line-breaking rules. We've dealt with the gotchas: fields that break mid-composition, character counters that miscount multibyte strings, and preview panes that mangle vertical text. Your editors should feel like the CMS was built for Japanese, not adapted from an English template.

It depends on your team. Sanity gives you the most control -- its customizable studio lets us build deeply Japanese-native editing experiences with custom input components and live preview. Contentful works well for larger teams that want a more structured, permission-heavy workflow out of the box. Storyblok is strong when visual editing and drag-and-drop layout matter more than schema flexibility. We'll recommend based on your editorial team's size, technical comfort, and integration needs -- not our preferences.

Yes to both. WordPress migrations are straightforward -- we extract via WP REST API or direct database export, transform into typed content models, and import into your headless CMS. Movable Type is more common in Japan and less standardized, so we typically write custom extraction scripts that parse MT's export format and map fields to your new schema. In both cases, we handle Japanese-specific issues like encoding normalization, image path rewrites, and preserving HTML content blocks that use CJK-specific markup.

Most projects land between ¥1.8M and ¥30M depending on scope. A single-language content site with a clean migration might be ¥1.8M-¥5M. A multilingual commerce-connected CMS with custom editor workflows, multiple publishing channels, and a performance-optimized front end runs ¥8M-¥30M. We scope in detail after a paid discovery phase, so you get a fixed quote before the build starts -- no open-ended timesheets.