Map the Japanese sources for a competitor and ask Claude to search them in Japanese

This lesson assumes the competitor list exists. If you are still deciding which Japanese companies count, the competitor identification lesson comes first.

Separate the search locale from the output language

“Research this competitor in Japan” hides two choices: the language and region of the requested sources, and the language of the answer. A PMM at a US head office may want Japanese sources summarized in English; a PMM in Tokyo may want the same sources summarized in Japanese for the local sales team. You can explicitly instruct Claude about the answer language. For source locale, state Japanese language and Japan scope in the request, then inspect the cited pages.

Anthropic’s web-search guide, checked September 16, 2026, does not identify a search-language or region control and says Claude may use IP-derived location for localized requests. The Research guide says Research uses the web and connected context. State Japanese language and Japan scope in the request, then check the cited pages.

Give Claude the competitor’s name in both scripts. Many Japanese software companies use a katakana or kanji name in Japanese and a romanized name in English, and a search on one spelling may miss pages that use the other. Then state the source language and ask Claude to report which language it used and which pages it could not open. If the cited pages are English, the result does not meet the requested source scope.

Research [competitor, Japanese name] / [competitor, English name] for the Japanese market.
Search Japanese-language sources in Japanese. Do not translate an English query.
For each result give the URL, the page language and the source type: review platform,
press release, the company's own site, or third-party commentary.
Extract only what the page states. Keep quotations in Japanese with the URL beside them.
Finish by stating which language you searched in and which pages you could not open.

Summaries can be in whichever language the reader needs; the quotations stay in Japanese so a reviewer can check them.

Where Japanese competitor information surfaces

Four places to open for a B2B software competitor in Japanese. Search snippets and Claude’s summaries point you at them; the page has to be open before anything from it is quoted.

The comparison page describes BOXIL as category-based discovery aimed at smaller companies and ITreview as closer to analyst-style grid reports. That is one content-marketing site’s framing. For this lesson we opened the BOXIL, ITreview and PR TIMES home pages on October 12, 2026. Use the table to decide where to look first, and confirm on the platforms themselves anything you will repeat.

Use the terms Japanese buyers use

A Japanese category label is not always the translation of the English one, and a search with the wrong label returns the wrong pages. The terms below come from the platform pages and snippets we read. Keep them in a reference file so nobody re-derives them per task.

Ask Claude to search with these terms and to flag any Japanese category name with no obvious English equivalent, so you decide whether it belongs on your map. When you collect reviews from either platform, the review-mining lesson covers keeping the original passage beside your interpretation. The same rules apply in Japanese.

Record where each Japanese fact came from

The research plan lesson covers the provenance record for any market: the source, the date, and what it said. Japanese sources add three fields, because the evidence travels further from the person who can verify it: the page language, whether you read the full page or only a snippet, and who translated or reviewed the passage you rely on. Record the translator or translation reviewer so responsibility for the wording is explicit.

Check each platform’s terms before copying review text into a shared document or a Claude Project. Reuse rules differ by site, and a Japanese terms page is one more thing for a fluent colleague to read. If reuse is unclear, keep the URL and your own paraphrase, marked as a paraphrase.

For repeated Japanese-market work, keep the source list, the term table and the provenance log in a Claude Project with your other company files. Give the competitor file an owner and a checked date.

Add a native-review checkpoint before anything ships

A grammatically correct translation can still read wrong to a Japanese sales rep, and a category label that is fine in English can name a different category in Japan. Neither error is visible to someone reading only the English summary. The last step before a Japanese-sourced claim reaches a battlecard, brief or messaging document is a fluent Japanese reader who signs off on the specific claims.

• The competitor’s name is spelled the way Japanese buyers write it, in both scripts where both exist.
• Each cited page is in Japanese, was opened in full, and has its URL and access date recorded.
• Every quoted passage keeps its Japanese original beside the translation, with the translator or translation reviewer named.
• Category and product terms match the wording on the source pages.
• The register fits the reader: a line written for a seller’s conversation does not read like a press release.
• The reviewer signed off on each specific claim going into the brief.

This lesson did not receive native-human review. Its terminology rests on the source pages; a fluent Japanese reader has not reviewed it, and the Japanese edition carries the same note. Claude can draft the checklist; a person completes it.

Where the manual method runs out

The manual method holds for one competitor checked occasionally. It strains when the Japan-locale instruction has to be repeated in every chat, when someone has to remember to revisit BOXIL and ITreview, and when a Japanese press release surfaces a week late because nobody searched that day.

If a Japanese competitor needs monitoring on a cadence, Steve’s competitive-intelligence product is the page to evaluate; confirm Japanese source coverage for your account. For an occasional look, the method above is enough.