The short answer
User Interviews is the most transparent recruiting platform in this market. They publish their prices, they publish their supported countries, and unusually, they publish panel counts per country. That last one is rare enough to be worth calling out: most vendors will not tell you how many people they have in a market.
So this page is not about whether they cover Japan. They do. It is about two other things: what $49 buys from each of us, and who those 6,448 people are.
The same headline price, very different scope
| torima.in Global | User Interviews | |
|---|---|---|
| Consumer session | $49 | $49 pay-as-you-go |
| B2B / professional session | Not offered — consumer panel only | $98 pay-as-you-go (+$20–49 for advanced B2B targeting) |
| Annual pricing | None | Essential $41 / $82; Professional $36 / $72 at 250+ sessions |
| What the fee buys | Recruiting, screening, the interview conducted in Japanese, translation, per-session summary, cross-session report | Recruiting and scheduling. You run the interview. |
| Incentive | Separate; you choose $14 / $21 / $34, and we pay it in yen inside Japan (¥2,000–¥5,000 to the participant) | Separate; you fund it. +3% if they distribute it. |
| AI moderation | Yes — the interview is conducted by an AI moderator, in Japanese | No. Their AI features analyse recordings; they do not conduct interviews. |
| Panel | Japan only; size shown live as you filter | 7.5M across 34 countries; Japan: 3,891 consumers, 2,557 professionals |
| Minimum | 5 sessions | None |
The headline number is identical, so the comparison comes down to one sentence: User Interviews charges $49 to find you a participant. We charge $49 to find one and interview them.
That is not a claim that we are better value. It is a description of two different products. If you have a Japanese-speaking researcher who wants to run the session personally, User Interviews' $49 is buying you exactly what you need and our extra services are dead weight. If you do not have that person, their $49 leaves you holding a scheduled call with a Japanese stranger and no way to conduct it.
Who are the 6,448?
This is the part worth thinking about, and it applies to every international platform, not only this one.
User Interviews recruits, screens and supports participants in English. There is no Japanese-language participant site. That is a sensible decision for a company serving 34 countries — building and staffing a Japanese-language recruiting operation for one market is a large investment.
It does have a consequence. EF's 2025 English Proficiency Index places Japan 96th of 123 countries and regions, in the "very low proficiency" band, after eleven consecutive years of decline. A panel assembled entirely through English in a country with that profile is not a cross-section of that country. It is a cross-section of the people there who operate comfortably in English — which, depending on your study, may be exactly right or may be the source of a confidently wrong conclusion.
We are not going to tell you those 6,448 people are expatriates or returnees. We do not know, nobody publishes panel composition, and asserting it would be the kind of claim we are asking you not to accept from anyone else. What we can say is how the selection works, because that is observable, and you can weigh it yourself.
torima.in's panel is assembled in the opposite direction: members find us, register, apply, interview and get paid entirely in Japanese, through the domestic marketplace UZRA Inc. has run since 2020. English exists only on the buyer's side. Our panel is not bigger than theirs and we are not going to claim it is — size is not the argument here.
What ten interviews actually cost
Ten 30-minute interviews with Japanese consumers.
User Interviews: 10 × $49 = $490 to recruit, plus incentives. At the Japanese norm of ¥3,000 (about $19) that is $190, plus 3% if they distribute — call it $686. You then need someone to conduct ten interviews in Japanese, transcribe them, translate them and analyse them. A professional Japanese-to-English transcription-and-translation service runs around $8 per minute, so translating ten 30-minute sessions alone would be roughly $2,400 before anyone has read a word of it.
torima.in: 10 × ($49 + $21) = $700, with the interviews conducted, the transcripts translated, each session summarised, and a report written across all ten.
The recruiting costs are within a few dollars of each other. The difference is everything after recruiting.
Where each one is the right choice
Use User Interviews when
- You are recruiting anywhere other than Japan — for 33 of their 34 countries this page has no argument to make
- Your study spans several countries and you want one vendor
- You have a Japanese-speaking researcher who wants to moderate personally
- You need B2B or professional respondents, where they have a real product and we have none
- You want live video sessions, screen sharing, or to watch someone use a prototype
- You need recruits for a longitudinal or diary study, where recontact matters
Use torima.in when
- Japan is the study, and nobody on your team speaks Japanese
- You want mainstream Japanese consumers rather than the segment an English funnel selects for
- You want the analysis in English without commissioning a translation
- Ten conversations this month matter more than five perfect ones next quarter
- Scheduling across a 16-hour gap is the thing actually blocking you
What we cannot do that they can
- 33 other countries. We do one.
- Live, moderated, video sessions. We do asynchronous text chat. That is a real limitation, not a stylistic choice — you lose facial expression, hesitation and the ability to react to a screen.
- B2B and professional audiences. Their $98 tier exists because they can fill it. Ours does not exist because we often cannot.
- A research CRM, participant management, a panel you own. Different product category.
- Recontact. Participants reach you as an ID; there are no follow-ups.
- A track record. They have years of it and published panel data. torima.in Global Research launched in 2026 with no case studies, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
One thing we would ask them, if we were you
Ask any platform — including us — how their participants in your target market were recruited, and in what language. Not "do you cover Japan?", which has a dropdown answer. "In what language does someone in Japan sign up, get screened and get paid?"
It is the question that separates a country in a list from a country in a panel, and every honest vendor can answer it in one sentence.
The other comparisons
- torima.in vs Respondent — their own documentation disagrees with itself about Japan.
- torima.in vs Prolific — much cheaper than us, and better for quantitative work.