Two things held up after I scanned 92 developer tools for how ready their front door is for a Japanese buyer. One thing I wanted to be true didn't, and I'm not going to fake it.
First: readiness isn't a slope, it's a cliff. A tool either ships a real Japanese site or it ships nothing. Of the 52 tools I added this round, 36 scored a flat zero and 16 had a genuine localized surface. Almost nothing sat in between.
Second, and this is the one I didn't expect. The companies that did localize, the mature ones with a Japanese marketing site and a Tokyo office, still skip the two signals that actually gate a purchase. Datadog, Snowflake, MongoDB, Okta, Twilio, Atlassian, Elastic, Databricks. Every one of them has a polished Japanese site. None of them has a 特商法 page. None of them prices in yen.
The thing I couldn't get was a clean "more readiness means more Japan revenue" number. More on why below, and why I'd rather say "I can't measure this" than dress up a correlation that falls apart when you push on it.
This is a follow-up. The first pass covered 40 tools and nearly all of them scored zero, which is useless for learning anything because there's no variance to look at. So this round I deliberately stacked in the incumbents to see what the top of the range looks like. Total is now 92 distinct tools, scanned the same way.
