Offshore Software Development for Japanese Companies: An English-Speaking Team

A Japanese company can hire an offshore software team in Dhaka, Bangladesh, if its product team works in English: Tokyo is 3 hours ahead, so a 9:00–18:00 day at both ends shares 6 hours, 12:00–18:00 Tokyo time. RAITHub delivers only in English and does not work in Japanese, so it suits English-speaking product teams, not Japanese-language projects.

This guide is for CTOs and product leads at Japanese companies whose engineering work already runs in English, and for foreign-founded startups in Tokyo, Osaka or Fukuoka. RAITHub is a founder-led software studio in Dhaka, so we have an interest in the answer. We have no office in Japan, no Japanese-speaking staff, and we will not pretend otherwise. Every outside figure below is linked so you can check it. Legal points are general information, not legal advice; confirm them with your adviser.

Who is an English-only offshore team right for in Japan?

It depends on the language your product decisions are made in, not the language your customers speak. A team in Dhaka can build a Japanese-language product, but only if someone on your side writes the specifications, reviews the screens and approves the copy in English. If requirements, meetings and acceptance testing happen in Japanese, an English-only vendor adds a translation step to every decision, and that is where projects slow down.

Your situation	Fit with an English-only team	Why
Foreign-founded startup in Japan, product team works in English	Good fit	Specs, reviews and stand-ups are already in English
Japanese company with an English-speaking product or platform team	Good fit	That team owns the decisions and can supply Japanese copy
Product sold outside Japan, run from a Japanese parent	Good fit	The product itself is in English
Business team writes requirements in Japanese, no English-speaking owner	Poor fit	Every requirement and bug report needs translating
Contracts, documentation and support must be in Japanese	Not a fit for RAITHub	RAITHub does not produce or review Japanese text
You need a vendor on site in Japan	Not a fit for RAITHub	RAITHub has no Japanese office

The honest test: can one person on your side write a feature request in English, and accept or reject the result in English, every week? If yes, the language question is solved. If not, choose a vendor that works in Japanese.

How many working hours does Tokyo share with Dhaka?

Six. Japan Standard Time is UTC+9 and Dhaka is UTC+6, and neither uses daylight saving, so the 3-hour gap is the same all year. With both sides working 9:00 to 18:00:

Tokyo time (UTC+9)	Dhaka time (UTC+6)	What usually happens
09:00–12:00	06:00–09:00	You read the written handoff from the previous day and reply with decisions
12:00–13:00	09:00–10:00	A common slot for the daily stand-up
13:00–18:00	10:00–15:00	Live collaboration: design reviews, demos, pairing on bugs
18:00–21:00	15:00–18:00	The team finishes the day's work and writes the handoff

That is a same-day working relationship: a question raised at 14:00 in Tokyo is usually answered that afternoon. The Tokyo morning is the gap, so decisions needed first thing should be written the evening before. RAITHub agrees the working week with each client; it is not fixed. For how the same arithmetic works elsewhere, see Bangladesh vs India vs Vietnam.

What does software development cost in Japan compared with a Dhaka team?

The gap is smaller than many Japanese buyers expect, and cost alone is a weak reason to go offshore from Japan. Levels.fyi puts median total compensation for software engineers in Japan at ¥8,661,581 a year from 435 submissions, and ¥8,044,641 in Tokyo, with a 25th percentile of ¥6.61 million and a 75th of ¥12.17 million (Levels.fyi Japan software engineer, updated 30 September 2026). It is a self-reported sample, so treat it as a guide rather than a price.

On the agency side, Clutch gives US$25 to US$49 an hour as the usual range for software development companies (Clutch pricing guide, updated 21 September 2026), and most Bangladesh firms in its directory list under US$25 or US$25 to US$49 (Clutch Bangladesh directory). Converted at about ¥157 per US$1, the cross rate implied by the European Central Bank's reference rates for 30 September 2026 (ECB euro reference rates):

Option, per engineer per month	Figure used	In JPY (about ¥157 per US$1)	What it includes
In-house engineer, Tokyo (median total pay)	¥8,044,641 a year	About ¥670,000	Salary only, before employer social insurance, recruitment and equipment
In-house engineer, Japan (75th percentile)	¥12.17 million a year	About ¥1,014,000	Salary only, as above
Offshore agency, 160 hours at US$25–49	US$4,000–7,840	About ¥628,000–1,231,000	Project management, code review, QA and replacement cover

These are market figures checked on 30 September 2026, not RAITHub prices; RAITHub publishes no hourly rate and quotes a fixed price after a free 15-minute technical audit. Read the table as a warning against a false saving. The reasons a Japanese company usually goes offshore are capacity and English: a team that can start in weeks, already works in English, and brings testing and review with it. If your only goal is a lower monthly number, a Tokyo hire at the median may cost about the same. For the Bangladesh side in more detail, see what developers in Bangladesh cost.

How does a Japanese-language product get built by an English-speaking team?

The same way any localised product does: the code is language-neutral, and the words come from files your team owns. RAITHub builds the interface, the layout and the input handling; your team or a translator supplies and approves every Japanese string. We cannot judge whether Japanese copy is correct or natural, and we say so up front.

Three engineering details matter more for Japanese than for most languages:

• Input method (IME) composition. Japanese users type kana and press Enter to confirm the conversion to kanji. A form that submits on Enter will fire mid-word unless it checks for composition.
• Yen formatting. The yen has no minor unit, so prices must never be stored or shown with decimals. Let Intl format them.
• Dates and time zones. Store UTC, and render in Asia/Tokyo with the Japanese date format.

// Enter confirms a kana-to-kanji conversion in a Japanese IME: don't submit then.
function onKeyDown(e: React.KeyboardEvent<HTMLInputElement>) {
  if (e.key === 'Enter' && !e.nativeEvent.isComposing) submitSearch()
}

// Yen has no minor unit; store integers and let Intl format them.
const yen = new Intl.NumberFormat('ja-JP', { style: 'currency', currency: 'JPY' })
yen.format(12800) // "￥12,800"

const date = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('ja-JP', { dateStyle: 'long', timeZone: 'Asia/Tokyo' })
date.format(new Date('2027-01-29T03:00:00Z')) // "2027年1月29日"

Budget time to test every screen with real Japanese copy, because Japanese text changes line length and wrapping in ways placeholder English never shows.

Can personal data stay in Japan while the team works from Dhaka?

Often, yes, and it is the cleanest design. Under Article 28 of the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI), providing personal data to a third party in a foreign country generally needs either the person's prior consent, given after they are told about the destination country, or a recipient that maintains measures equivalent to the Act, which for a vendor usually means a contract (PPC guidelines on provision to a third party in a foreign country, in Japanese). An English translation of the Act is on Japanese Law Translation. This is general information; confirm the current rule with your adviser and the Personal Information Protection Commission.

The engineering answer shrinks the question. Keep production in your own cloud account in Japan, for example AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo), ap-northeast-1, or Asia Pacific (Osaka), ap-northeast-3 (AWS Regions). The team builds and tests against synthetic data, deploys through your pipeline, and has no standing access to production. Whether occasional remote access for an incident counts as a provision in your set-up is a question for your adviser. When enterprise customers ask how this works, answering a security questionnaire without SOC 2 shows how to describe it honestly.

How do Japanese payment methods change the scope?

Japanese customers expect more than cards, and each method is its own integration to scope, test and reconcile. Stripe's Japan pricing page lists 3.6% for cards, 3.6% with a ¥120 minimum for konbini (convenience-store) payments, and 3.98% for PayPay (Stripe Japan pricing, checked 30 September 2026).

• Konbini payments complete later, in a shop, so the order must wait for the confirmation event, and unpaid vouchers need an expiry path.
• Wallets such as PayPay hand the customer off to another app, so the redirect back is not proof of payment; the webhook is.

This is engineering guidance. RAITHub has shipped Stripe rent collection in PropDesk, and bKash, Nagad, SSLCommerz and cash on delivery in TheSkinProof, which is the founder's own venture rather than a client project. It has not shipped konbini or PayPay. Testing payments and webhooks covers the patterns that carry over.

Should a Japanese company hire a fixed-scope project or a dedicated team?

Fixed scope for a defined release, such as an MVP or a new customer portal; a dedicated monthly team for a roadmap that keeps changing. If your organisation prefers a detailed specification signed off before work starts, a fixed-scope project fits that well once discovery is done. Dedicated team vs fixed price explains the trade-off, and how to check a Bangladesh software agency lists the due-diligence questions to ask first.

Why RAITHub for this

• A clear language contract. Everything is in English: specs, stand-ups, pull requests, documentation. No surprise translation layer, and no pretence of Japanese.
• Six shared hours with Tokyo, every working day, plus written daily handoffs.
• Tests you can read. PropDesk, the property management platform RAITHub built, runs 1,024 automated tests; Sundor Skin runs 146 PostgreSQL tables with row-level security and 530+ tests. See the work.
• Your data, your region. Production stays in your Japanese cloud account; RAITHub signs DPAs and your data-handling clauses and follows your controls.
• Clear terms. Fixed-scope or a dedicated monthly team, founder-led, a free 15-minute audit, then a fixed written quote. You own the IP; NDA is standard. First releases run under MVP development, multi-tenant products under SaaS development.

When you don't need us

• Your team works in Japanese. If requirements, reviews or support must be in Japanese, choose a Japanese-speaking vendor. RAITHub does not work in Japanese.
• You need someone on site in Japan, or a vendor with a Japanese entity. RAITHub has neither.
• Your procurement requires ISO 27001 (ISMS) or SOC 2. RAITHub holds neither certification.
• You want engineers placed in your team under your management. RAITHub does not offer staff augmentation.
• You need a native iOS or Android app. RAITHub builds web apps and PWAs only.
• Your only goal is a lower monthly cost. As the table shows, a Tokyo hire can cost about the same; hire locally if the language fit is better.

Sources checked on 30 September 2026. Yen figures converted at about ¥157 per US$1 from ECB reference rates for 30 September 2026. Legal points are general information; confirm with your adviser.

If your product team works in English and none of the above rules us out, book the free 15-minute technical audit. Bring your feature list and who on your side will own decisions in English.

Frequently asked questions

Can a Japanese company outsource software development to Bangladesh?

Yes, if the work can be specified, reviewed and accepted in English. Tokyo shares 6 working hours a day with Dhaka on a 9:00 to 18:00 day at both ends. If personal data is involved, APPI Article 28 applies, so confirm the transfer route with your adviser.

Does RAITHub work in Japanese?

No. RAITHub delivers only in English: meetings, specifications, code review and documentation. It can build a Japanese-language interface using copy your team or a translator supplies and approves, but it does not write or review Japanese text.

What is the time difference between Tokyo and Dhaka?

Tokyo is 3 hours ahead of Dhaka all year, because neither Japan nor Bangladesh uses daylight saving. With both teams on 9:00 to 18:00, the shared window is 12:00 to 18:00 Tokyo time, 6 hours.

Is offshore development cheaper than hiring in Tokyo?

Less than many expect. Levels.fyi puts median software engineer pay in Tokyo at about ¥8.04 million a year, around ¥670,000 a month before employer costs, while an agency at US$25 to US$49 an hour costs about ¥628,000 to ¥1,231,000 for 160 hours. The stronger reasons are capacity, speed to start and English.

Can an offshore team build a web app that accepts konbini or PayPay?

Yes, as integration work through a provider such as Stripe, which lists both for Japan. Each is a separate line item with its own tests, because the payment completes outside your checkout. RAITHub has not yet shipped either in production.

Does RAITHub build mobile apps for Japanese companies?

No. RAITHub builds web applications and PWAs that run in phone and desktop browsers from one codebase. For native iOS or Android apps, hire a mobile specialist.