Tech/Startup Meetup Communities, Conferences, Event Platforms and Business News

Doing Business in Japan

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Knowledge base on doing business in Japan. Topics: visas and immigration (including the Business Manager visa 経営・管理 and the October 2025 reform), company registration (株式会社/合同会社/個人事業主), taxes, legal issues and cases, documents and procedures (banking, offices, accounting, hiring), useful links and contacts, and other business-relevant topics (culture and mentality, networking, marketing, real estate, lending, insurance).

TokyoDev is a mostly English-language Discord community for IT professionals and founders in Japan, which also runs an annual IT-salary survey and publishes articles on developer salaries. Hacker News Tokyo and Hacker News Osaka are independent community meetups unrelated to the American Hacker News website. Tokyo AI (TAI) is recommended as the best AI meetup in Tokyo, running TAI AMA networking sessions for the ML/AI community via lu.ma; nposw.org is a Japanese-language community for those interested in machine learning; and Startup Lunch Club holds regular Tuesday 11:30 meetups for founders. japantech.info is a weekly digest of technology and startup events in Japan, compiled by a community member and updated with both an all-events category page and per-week archives. For conferences, Takeoff Tokyo targets startups and investors; IT Week Tokyo is a major exhibition/conference; IVS is a startup conference that one community member described as "super useless" for matching startups with investors (a personal, unverified opinion echoed about a related Osaka conference); and ANLP is an annual academic NLP conference. Meetup, Peatix, Doorkeeper, Connpass and LinkedIn are the main platforms used to find networking events in Japan. The Pick Place Podcast covers business in Japan, grjapan.com's insights section is considered a reliable source for political analysis (for example, following a prime minister's resignation), and individual analysts' accounts on X and Bluesky were noted as personal news sources; Bloomberg, Nikkei and Asahi were cited as general business media, with nippon.com serving as a baseline source for cultural context. Source: https://2024.surveys.tokyodev.com/en-US/current-job/ — TokyoDev's annual IT salary survey. Source: https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/software-developer-salaries-in-japan — TokyoDev article on software-developer salaries in Japan. Source: https://hntokyo.io/en/ — Hacker News Tokyo — independent community meetup. Source: https://nposw.org/ — Japanese-language community for those interested in machine learning. Source: https://www.startuplunch.club/understanding-godo-gaisha-and-kabushiki-gaisha/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content — Startup Lunch Club — regular Tuesday founder meetups. Source: https://japantech.info/2024-10-06-weekly-events-digest-10-7-10-13/ — example issue of the japantech.info weekly events digest. Source: https://www.takeoff-tokyo.com/ — Takeoff Tokyo — event for startups and investors. Source: https://anlp.jp/nlp2025/ — ANLP — annual academic NLP conference. Source: https://connpass.com/ — Connpass — platform for finding networking events in Japan. Source: https://www.pickplacepodcast.com/about — Pick Place Podcast — podcast on business in Japan. Source: https://grjapan.com/insights/insights/political-update-ldp-faces-reckoning-following-ishibas-resignation — grjapan.com insights — political analysis on Japan. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/tobiasharris.bsky.social — Bluesky profile of a Japan-focused political analyst. Source: https://www.nippon.com/ru/in-depth/c15505/?fbclid=IwY2xjawN5FkxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFrdHpXQm1TVjFrcEVNZWJmc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHrNtaQxXwIs6a_vmzENiq0BzhOzVDNflYrXSfR9Zndwn3TpZLKJ8JswI3MKE_aem_u2dsiitVFqbmhMZAUShVuw — nippon.com — baseline source for cultural context on Japan.