note.com: Reading How Japanese Leaders Actually Think

Before a first meeting with a Japanese counterpart, most European teams prepare the same way they would at home: skim the company website, read the press releases, check the LinkedIn profiles. All of it filtered, all of it written to sound a certain way. You walk in knowing the corporate line and almost nothing about the person across the table.

There is a better source, and it is one most non-Japanese teams never look at. It is called note.

What note.com actually is

note.com is a Japanese publishing platform, run by note inc., founded in 2011 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under code 5243. The simplest way to picture it: Japan's Medium. People and companies write essays, articles and notes, and readers follow the writers they care about.

It is not a niche corner of the internet. According to note inc.'s investor-relations material, the platform has around 65.7 million monthly active users, and its business tier, note pro, is used by tens of thousands of companies. Both are company-reported, and we could not confirm the note pro count on the public IR page, so treat them as an indication of scale rather than precise numbers. Either way, this is a mainstream place where Japanese professional life happens in writing.

The important part for anyone doing business in Japan is who writes there and how they write. Senior Japanese executives do publish substantial, candid writing on note under their own names, in their own voice, and it is not press-release material.

note's own leadership is the clearest worked example, because you can check it in a minute. Sadaaki Kato, note's CEO, posts directly to the platform under his own name. Takayuki Fukatsu, better known by the handle fladdict and appointed note's Chief Strategy Officer in July 2026, published an essay on how to invert the standard playbook for wrecking an organisation in order to unstick one that will not move; it drew over a thousand likes. Note's Chief Design Officer writes there too, on what his job becomes in an era when everyone is a maker. The company also runs a dedicated investor-relations account, note IR (5243), which posts monthly reports, earnings-briefing write-ups and answers to investor questions in public, on the same consumer platform anyone else uses.

That is the genuine article: senior people thinking out loud, at length, in public. In Europe the equivalent thinking tends to stay inside the company or gets flattened into a LinkedIn post written for reach.

Now the honest caveat, because it changes how you use the platform. note is not a curated feed of chief executives. Browse the popular articles under a business tag like keiei (management) and what you mostly find is solo consultants, tax accountants, career coaches and small-business advisors building personal brands, publishing daily, and selling their services. It is closer to LinkedIn's creator layer than to a boardroom. One marketing consultant can occupy half the front page.

So do not browse note for wisdom. Search it for a specific person. The value is not in the feed; it is in the fact that the individual you are about to meet may have written thousands of candid words about how they see their market, and almost no European competitor will have read them.

Why it belongs at Stage 0 of your Japan work

Think of your Japan preparation as stages. Stage 0 is intelligence: understanding the people and companies before you ever reach out. This is where note earns its place.

Reading a target CEO's note before a meeting tells you how they actually think. You see the problems they keep returning to, the language they use, the beliefs they hold about their industry. You learn what they are proud of and what they are quietly frustrated by. None of this comes through in a company profile, and almost none of it comes through in a first meeting conducted through the usual polite opening moves.

The practical payoff is direct. You walk in already fluent in their concerns. You can reference a point they made without flattering them, ask a question that shows you did the reading, and skip the generic opening that signals you treated them as one prospect among many. In a market where trust and preparation carry unusual weight, that is a real edge, and it costs you an hour of reading.

This sits naturally alongside the rest of the Japanese business-networking stack. If you are mapping how Japanese firms actually connect and communicate, note is the intelligence layer beneath it. Our pillar on Japan B2B networking walks through the channels themselves; note is where you go to understand the people on the other end before you use any of them.

How a non-Japanese reader actually uses it

Here is the honest constraint: the consumer platform is Japanese-first. The English material is the investor-relations site; the reading experience itself has no native English mode. So the workflow below is the practical way in for a non-Japanese reader, not an official English feature note provides.

Getting started is straightforward:

• Register. You can sign up with an email address, or with a Google or X account.
• Find the writer, do not browse. Search for the specific person or company by name, or follow a link you already have. Guessing a URL does not work: note.com/<company> is usually an unrelated individual who registered the handle first, not the company. Verify you are on the right profile before you read anything into it.
• Read through auto-translate. Use your browser's built-in translation to render the essays in your own language, then read as you normally would.

That is genuinely all it takes to start pulling signal. The register-and-read loop is low effort, and you can do a useful pass on one person in a single sitting. If your counterpart writes regularly, read the most recent handful of essays first, because they tell you what is on their mind right now, then work backwards for the longer-running themes.

The one caution is nuance. You are reading through machine translation, so tone, hedging and implication can get flattened or slightly mistranslated. Treat the broad strokes as reliable, the exact phrasing less so. Where a translated line seems unusually blunt or unusually vague, assume the original carried a shade the machine dropped, and check it with a Japanese-speaking colleague before you build anything important on it.

Reading versus publishing: two very different commitments

It is worth separating two things people lump together.

Reading note is low effort and high return. There is no reason not to do it as standard practice before meetings with any Japanese leader or company that writes there. Make it part of your Stage 0 checklist and it quietly improves every first conversation.

Publishing your own note is a different proposition. To be worth doing, it means writing in Japanese, consistently, in a voice that reads as genuine to a Japanese audience. That is a real commitment of capacity and time, and it only makes sense once you have the Japanese-language ability to sustain it. For most European firms, publishing is an optional, advanced move to consider later, not a first step. Read first. Publish only when you can do it properly.

The takeaway

note is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort intelligence sources available to anyone doing business in Japan, and it is hiding in plain sight behind a Japanese-only interface. The platform is large and mainstream, the writers are candid, and the reading workflow takes an evening to learn.

Do the reading before your next meeting. Understanding how your counterpart actually thinks, in their own words, is worth far more than another pass over their polished website.

Sources and Further Reading

1. note inc. investor relations
2. note inc. corporate site: note's own newsroom and IR feed, where the executive and note IR (5243) posts referenced above are listed. Claims about who publishes on note were checked here on 2026-07-15.

Sourcing note: note's monthly-active-user and note pro company figures are company-reported via investor relations. We were unable to confirm the note pro company count on the cited IR page at the time of writing, so treat it as indicative of scale rather than a precise number.