Eight and Sansan: How Japan Really Manages Business Cards

The business-card exchange in Japan, the meishi ritual, is not a formality you get through on the way to the real meeting. It is the real meeting's opening move. Higher-ranking people present their cards first, and the title printed on the card you receive is read carefully, because it tells each side where they stand relative to the other. Get that moment right and you have a relationship. The question nobody prepares a European for is what happens to the twenty cards in your pocket the day after. Left in a drawer, they are dead weight. This is where a single Japanese app does more for your Japan pipeline than anything in your usual stack.

Eight and Sansan Are Two Different Things

Start by separating the names, because they get mixed up constantly. Sansan, Inc. is a Tokyo company, founded in 2007 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as 4443. It makes two products.

Sansan is the enterprise product: a corporate contact-management system that a whole company runs. It holds about 82.4% of the Japanese corporate business-card-management market and is used by around 10,000 companies across 64 countries (company data). If your Japanese counterpart's firm digitises its cards centrally, this is probably what it uses. You will not install it.

Eight is the personal one, and it is the one you want. It is a free app for individuals, with roughly 3.8 million users, and it does for a single person's stack of cards what Sansan does for a company's (Eight, 8card.net/en). Same lineage, different job. When someone tells you to "just put it in Sansan," they usually mean Eight.

Keeping the two straight matters for one practical reason: the often-quoted "99.9% accuracy" figure belongs to the Sansan side, not Eight, so do not go into a meeting citing it for the free app. Judge Eight on what it does for you, which is plenty.

What Eight Does, in Order

Think of Eight as sitting across the middle of the relationship, from the meeting itself through to keeping the contact alive months later. Three steps, and only the first needs any effort.

One: scan on the spot. At the event or in the meeting room, once the cards are exchanged, you photograph each physical meishi inside the app. The card is digitised for you, and from then on you can search that person by name, company or title (Eight, 8card.net/en). No stack to type up on the flight home, no cards lost between hotel and office. Do it while you are still in the room.

Two: search when you need them. Weeks later, when you are trying to remember who the procurement lead at that trading company was, you search rather than dig. The digitised record is there.

Three, the one that earns its place: the career-move alert. This is the feature that justifies the whole app. When one of your contacts updates their own card, because they have changed jobs or been promoted, Eight notifies you (Eight). In a market where relationships are personal and job moves quietly reshuffle who holds which authority, that alert is the difference between a contact who has vanished and a warm reason to get back in touch. "Congratulations on the new role" is one of the easiest re-openers there is, and Eight hands it to you.

That third step is why Eight is a maintenance instrument, not a filing cabinet. The value is not in storing the card; it is in the card staying current on its own.

What to Expect, and What Not To

Set expectations honestly, because Eight is not a Japanese LinkedIn and using it as one will disappoint you.

Connection on Eight is by card exchange or mutual consent. You are linked to people you have actually met and swapped cards with, not to a searchable open directory of strangers. From what the model of the app tells us and how it is used in practice, this makes it a tool for holding the relationships the meishi ritual creates, rather than a channel for cold prospecting. The network you will see is also overwhelmingly Japanese, which is a feature if your business is Japan and a limitation if you were hoping to work the rest of Asia from the same place.

So do not reach for Eight to find new prospects. First contact in Japan still runs through in-person meetings, trade shows and introductions. What Eight does is make sure the contacts you earn that way do not decay. It is the layer that keeps stage two through four of a relationship, meeting, connecting and maintaining, from leaking.

This is worth sitting with, because it inverts the European habit. At home you are used to networking software as a top-of-funnel machine: search, filter, message someone you have never met. Eight refuses that framing by design. Its whole logic is downstream of a physical handshake. If you arrive expecting to turn it into a discovery engine you will conclude it is a weak version of a tool you already have, and you will miss what it is actually good at. Judge it as a memory and retention layer and it is quietly excellent; judge it as a lead source and it will look thin. The mismatch is in the expectation, not the app.

If you want the fuller picture of where Eight sits among the other channels, the messaging apps, the professional networks, the discovery tools, that is the subject of our Japan B2B networking guide. The short version: Eight is the memory layer under the whole stack.

Free or Premium

Eight is free to download on iOS and Android, and the English site at 8card.net/en carries an English and Japanese toggle, so you are not forced through a Japanese-only signup. For most European visitors the free tier covers the whole job: scan, search, get the job-change alerts.

Premium exists if you exchange cards in volume. It costs 600 yen a month or 6,000 yen a year and adds both-sided card capture, the ability to download your contacts and a view of common connections (Eight). Whether that is worth it comes down to how many cards you actually collect. Take Premium if you are running a booth at a Tokyo trade show and coming home with a hundred meishi; stay on free if you are doing a handful of meetings.

The Verdict, and the One-Off Setup

Register on Eight before any trip to Japan. Do it at home, in English, so the app is ready and you are not fumbling with a signup while someone is holding out their card with both hands. Then, during the trip, scan every meishi on the spot, in the room, the moment the exchange is done.

After that, it runs itself. The setup is a single act; the payoff is passive, arriving as an alert months later when a contact you had half-forgotten turns up in a new role and hands you a reason to reconnect. That is a good trade for ten minutes of setup.

One caution to close on. Eight holds real people's contact details, and Japanese business culture is careful about how cards and personal information are handled. Scan and store, yes. Do not treat the digitised pile as a list to blast. The point of the meishi, and of the app that remembers it, is the relationship, not the database.

For the next move after the card is scanned, the Facebook follow-up that Japanese counterparts tend to expect within a day or two, see our note on Facebook for B2B in Japan.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Eight, by Sansan, Inc.
2. Sansan, Inc.

Sourcing note: the Eight user count, the Sansan market-share and company figures, and the Eight Premium price are company-reported and not independently audited. Prices in particular decay; check the current figure before you rely on it.