Japanese overseas assignments usually fail on adaptation and leadership, not language. A 2025 survey of large Japanese companies found that more than 90 percent had seen expatriates return early, and the most common reasons were difficulty adjusting to local culture and poor communication with local staff. Language problems ranked well below both. Companies that prepare managers only with language lessons and safety briefings are training for the wrong problem.

What did the survey find?

In September 2025, the English training company Bizmates published a survey of HR and training staff at Japanese companies with 500 or more employees that send staff overseas. More than nine in ten respondents said their company had experienced an employee returning early from an overseas assignment.

The reasons they gave are the interesting part:

Could not adapt to local culture and values: 35.0 percent
Communication with local staff broke down: 33.8 percent
Held on to Japanese ways of working and did not adapt to local practice: 26.0 percent
Insufficient language skills affected the work: 18.8 percent

The survey also found that fewer than three in ten companies make pre-assignment training mandatory, and it pointed to a gap between what that training covers and what expatriates actually struggle with.

Why isn’t language the main problem?

Language matters, but a manager with decent English or local-language skills can still fail if they cannot build trust with a team that works differently. The survey results describe leadership problems: reading what local staff expect, explaining decisions, adapting to different speeds of decision-making, and knowing when a headquarters process needs to change for local conditions.

Many Japanese managers are promoted for performing well inside a Japanese organization. They know how to build consensus through nemawashi, work within a seniority system and manage through long-term relationships. Those are real skills. Abroad they can look slow, opaque or indecisive to staff who expect a manager to decide, explain and delegate. When the manager falls back on familiar habits, such as insisting on paper approvals, routing every decision to Tokyo or waiting for consensus that local staff do not know how to give, the local team disengages.

What does headquarters get wrong?

An expatriate often sits between two sets of expectations. Headquarters expects Japanese processes, reporting and approvals. Local staff expect a manager with authority to make decisions. If the expatriate has no real authority, every issue becomes a request to Tokyo and a delay for the local team.

Training that focuses on safety and basic language does not prepare anyone for that position. It treats the assignment as a relocation, when it is really a leadership role in a different business culture. The same pattern shows up in product development, where the long-discussed “Galapagos” problem describes Japanese products built to a domestic standard and hard to sell abroad. In both cases the organization is designed around the home market and treats the rest of the world as an extension of it.

The leadership pipeline reinforces this. Senior management at most large Japanese companies is still overwhelmingly Japanese and promoted on domestic performance. When international experience is not clearly rewarded in promotion, the most ambitious managers have little reason to invest in it, and returning expatriates often find their overseas experience undervalued.

How should companies prepare managers for international assignments?

Train for leadership in context

Pre-assignment training should cover how decisions are made, how feedback is given and how authority works in the destination country, taught through realistic scenarios rather than etiquette lists. Coaching during the first months of the assignment is often more useful than a course before departure.

Give the role real authority

Decide before departure what the manager can approve locally and what must go to headquarters. Write it down. A manager who can make decisions earns credibility with the local team quickly. One who cannot will struggle regardless of their skills.

Adapt processes, not just people

Review which headquarters processes actually need to apply locally. Paper-based approvals, hanko, Japanese-only documents and long consensus chains may be essential in Tokyo and counterproductive elsewhere. Shared tools that work in both languages, such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or a common project tool, reduce friction between the two offices. I compare some of these options in Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 in Japan.

Value the experience when people return

Returning expatriates bring knowledge that headquarters needs. If they come back to roles that ignore it, the company loses the benefit and the next candidates notice.

Does this apply to foreign companies in Japan?

The same problem runs in the other direction. Foreign companies send managers to Japan who have strong track records at home and struggle here for the mirror-image reasons: they misread consensus as indecision, push for speed without the relationships to support it, or impose headquarters processes that do not fit Japanese customers, partners or regulations. Language is rarely the whole story for them either.

In both directions, the fix is similar: give the local operation clear authority, adapt processes where local conditions require it, and support the manager in learning how the team works. I write more about leading Japanese teams in Japanese leadership culture and wa, and about how training programs often miss the point in corporate training programs and Japanese leadership.

For foreign-owned businesses in Japan, the gap often shows up in systems as well as management: tools chosen by headquarters that do not fit local workflows, reporting that assumes one language, and vendors nobody locally owns. My page for foreign-owned SMEs in Japan explains how I help those companies set up tools and operations that work for both the Japanese team and the head office.

Further reading: Japanese leadership culture and wa · training leaders through the work they actually do · turning a business decision into working practice in Japan