“Our product has traction in Japan! What now?”

If you find yourself asking this question, you’re in good company. Japan is an amazing place to have a following, as many startups have discovered. With 115 million internet users and a sophisticated consumer culture, anything is possible here. Twitter, for example, who invested early in Japan-specific research, content, product and marketing, grew from 7 to 35 million users over the last five years in Japan.

115 million internet users — Internet penetration in Japan stands at 90.6% (Internet Live Stats (www.InternetLiveStats.com))

As a product design studio based in Tokyo, we’ve helped teams around the world navigate the massive opportunity and unique cultural challenge that Japan represents.

A year ago, Medium began to explore how it could better serve Japan, working with local editors and ambassadors to support writers. Recently, we sat down with Luke and Marcin from Medium’s international and design teams to map out what to do next: information architecture? UI translation? help content? After looking at the product from every angle, we realized what was most important: typography!

Pinterest looked at Japanese typography as part of a redesign to fuel international growth.

Why type? In our 12 years of UX research for internationalization, careless Japanese typography has consistently hurt perceptions of product quality, yet it usually takes teams years to address the problem. We’ve heard Japanese users described products as “unnatural”, “foreign”, and “suspicious.” Pinterest, in Japan since 2013, began refining Japanese type last year after an employee described their homepage as “when someone tries to overcome a language barrier by talking louder.”

The work to get from unnatural to perfect is not hard, and there are more interesting challenges for you to spend time on, so we’ve put together a little primer to get you most of the way there. (If you want to go further, we’re happy to help.)