Interview real Japanese consumers. Read the findings in English.
torima.in Global Research runs AI-moderated chat interviews with people who live in Japan and speak Japanese as their first language. You write the objective in English. We interview in Japanese. You get an English summary of every session, the full transcript, and a report across all of them.
$49 per completed session, plus the participant incentive you choose ($14 / $21 / $34). Each incentive funds a ¥2,000–¥5,000 payment made to the participant in Japanese yen. Studies run from 5 to 50 sessions. Card payment, no sales call, no subscription.
- Panel recruited, verified and paid by us, in Japan, in Japanese
- Participants are never identified to you by name or contact details
- Unused sessions are refunded in full — fee and incentive
The people in most "Japan" research panels are not the people you are trying to reach
International recruiting platforms run their sign-up flow, their screeners and their support in English. The Japanese residents who complete an English sign-up flow are not a random sample of Japan — they skew toward people who work in English, study abroad, or moved to Japan from somewhere else. For a study about how a product fits into ordinary life in Japan, that is the wrong population, and it is a hard problem to see from the outside: the platform reports that it found you ten participants in Japan, and it did.
The alternative most teams fall back on is a Japanese research agency. That works, and for high-stakes generative work it is often the right answer — but it means an email thread, a scoped quote, a purchase order and a few weeks. Most agencies serving overseas clients do not publish a price at all.
torima.in sits between the two. The panel is ours and it is Japanese-language: people find us, sign up and take part entirely in Japanese, which is why they are the people you want to talk to. The ordering side is English and self-serve, and the price is on this page.
We also wrote up every way to recruit Japanese participants, including the ones that do not involve us.
Three steps, no calls
Describe what you want to learn
Write your research objective in English, the way you would explain it to a colleague. We draft a full interview guide in Japanese from it — opening, topics, follow-up probes, closing.
You review the guide in English, edit any question, and regenerate it if it has missed the point. Nothing is charged until you have approved the guide, chosen your audience and confirmed the price.
Choose who you want to talk to
Filter the panel on registered attributes: gender, age band, region, occupation and household income. As you narrow, the page shows how many panel members currently match.
Then add screening criteria in your own words — things no profile field can answer, like "cancelled a paid language-learning subscription in the last six months". Participants declare against those when they apply, and the interviewer confirms them in the first exchange of the session.
Choose the number of sessions (5–50) and the incentive ($14, $21, $34 per participant). Every session runs about 30 minutes.
Pay, then read the results as they arrive
Pay by card. Recruiting starts immediately. Participants take the interview in Japanese, as a text chat, whenever suits them — no scheduling, no time-zone negotiation, no video call at 2am.
Each completed session appears in your dashboard with an English summary and the full transcript. Once enough sessions are in, a report across all of them is generated.
English deliverables, from a Japanese conversation
- SummaryKey findings written as full sentences, not bullets of keywords.
- Notable quotesAttributed to a study-scoped participant ID (P-0007), shown in English with the Japanese original available.
- Full transcriptEvery exchange, machine-translated and reviewed for meaning; the original Japanese transcript is available on request.
- PDF exportTake the session out of the dashboard and into your own deck.
- Executive summaryWhat the whole set of interviews says.
- Key themesWith the number of participants who raised each one.
- Segment differencesHow answers split by the attributes you filtered on.
- RecommendationsWith an impact/effort read on each.
- Live progressA list of your studies with a live progress count.
- The audience you setEvery filter and screening criterion, as you saved it.
- The price you paidThe full breakdown, line by line.
- Session statusIn progress, under review, completed.
A Japanese-language consumer panel
Everyone in the panel lives in Japan and uses Japanese as their first language. They joined through the Japanese-language side of torima.in, which has been running since 2020.
You can filter on: gender · age band · region (prefecture group) · occupation · household income
You can screen on anything else in free text. Screening criteria are self-declared when a participant applies and confirmed by the interviewer at the start of the session. They are deliberately not counted in the panel-size estimate, because we cannot know in advance how many people will match a condition we have never asked about.
Where this panel will not help you
We would rather you find this out here than after you have paid.
- It is a consumer panel. Narrow B2B and specialist professional audiences — enterprise IT decision-makers, practising physicians, factory procurement leads — are the kind of audience we often cannot fill. The panel-size estimate on the audience screen is shown before you pay for exactly this reason.
- It is Japan-resident only. Japanese speakers living outside Japan, and non-Japanese residents of Japan, are not in scope.
- It is not a quantitative sample. A study is 5 to 50 depth interviews. If you need n=1,000 with statistical weighting, you need a survey panel, not us.
- You cannot recontact anyone. No follow-up study with the same people, no diary study, no longitudinal panel — the participant's identity is not disclosed to you and, under our terms, may not be pursued.
$49 per completed session, plus the incentive
Two line items, both shown before you pay, both charged in US dollars through Stripe.
| Incentive you choose | Suits | Per completed session | 5 sessions | 10 sessions | 20 sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $14 ¥2,000 | Broad consumer criteria | $63 ($49 + $14) | $315 | $630 | $1,260 |
| $21 ¥3,000 | Narrow criteria, or a faster fill | $70 ($49 + $21) | $350 | $700 | $1,400 |
| $34 ¥5,000 | Hard-to-reach participants | $83 ($49 + $34) | $415 | $830 | $1,660 |
Ten 30-minute interviews with women aged 30–49 in the Kanto region who have cancelled a subscription service in the last six months: 10 × ($49 + $21) = $700, paid once, up front.
- Recruiting and screening participants who match your criteria
- AI moderation of the interview, in Japanese
- Translation, the per-session summary and the cross-session report
- Paying the participant in yen, inside Japan
- No seat fee and no charge for extra users on your account
- No platform subscription
- No minimum annual commitment
- Anything not on the list to the left
Incentives are priced in US dollars and paid out in Japanese yen: $14 pays ¥2,000, $21 pays ¥3,000, $34 pays ¥5,000.
The dollar figure converts the yen amount at the rate in effect when you order, with a buffer that protects the participant's yen amount against currency movement between your payment and their payout — so the exact dollar amount is confirmed on screen before you pay, and the table above may move by a dollar or two. The participant receives the full yen amount; we do not take a cut of the incentive.
What happens if a session does not complete
You are charged for the sessions you ordered up front, but you keep the money for any that do not complete. You can stop recruiting at any time and the platform fee and the incentive for every unused session are refunded to your card. A session that a participant abandons, or that fails our quality review, does not consume a slot — recruiting simply continues.
We have no case studies yet. Here is what we can show you instead.
torima.in Global Research is new. Rather than dress up a launch with borrowed credibility, here are the four things you can actually verify before you spend anything.
You never receive personal data
Participants reach you as a study-scoped ID plus the attributes you filtered on. Names, contact details, exact ages and any free-text identifier are removed before anything reaches your dashboard. This is not a policy we could quietly change: it is how the product is built, and our terms forbid you from trying to identify, contact or re-target a participant.
Every session is reviewed before it reaches you
A completed interview is scored automatically against the guide — did the participant engage with the topics, is there enough substance, do the screening answers hold up. Sessions that clear the bar are delivered and the participant is paid. Sessions that do not are held for a person on our team to read, and can be rejected. A rejected session frees its slot and recruiting continues, at no extra cost to you.
Unused sessions are refunded in full
Not credits. Not a discount on your next study. The platform fee and the incentive go back to the card you paid with.
Your counterparty is a Japanese company
UZRA Inc., registered in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, incorporated May 2020, operating the torima.in research marketplace since then. The panel is ours; incentives are paid by us in yen inside Japan; the participant's agreement is with us, under Japanese law. You are buying a research service, not renting access to a broker's panel.
Use something else if…
- You need a live, moderated session. We do not run video interviews. If you need to watch someone use a prototype, or you need a moderator who can change direction in the moment, book a Japanese research agency or use a platform with live scheduling.
- You need to observe behaviour, not hear about it. This is a conversation. It captures what people say, remember and believe — not what they do.
- Your audience is narrow B2B. The panel-size estimate will tell you before you pay, and it is often too low to order against.
- You need any market other than Japan.We do one country. Respondent, User Interviews and Prolific cover many, and we have written honest comparisons of each.
Compared with the alternatives
| torima.in Global | International recruiting platform | Japanese research agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Panel | Japan-resident, Japanese first language | Japan sometimes listed; who is actually there depends on who completed an English sign-up | Japan-resident, via partner panels |
| Interview language | Japanese | English, or you supply a Japanese moderator | Japanese |
| Who runs the interview | AI, asynchronously | You | A human moderator |
| Deliverable | English summary, transcript, cross-session report | Raw recruits — you do everything else | Full report, on their timeline |
| Price | Published: $49 + incentive | Published, recruiting only | Quote on request |
| To get started | Card | Card | Email, scope, PO |
The questions we are asked first
How many participants do I need?
In a single, coherent audience, most teams find that themes start repeating around the eighth to tenth interview, and ten is a reasonable default. 5 is the minimum and is enough to test a strong, specific hypothesis. If you are comparing two audiences — say lapsed users against active ones — treat each as its own study rather than splitting ten sessions between them.
How good is the translation?
Summaries, quotes and transcripts are machine-translated and reviewed for meaning before delivery. The original Japanese is kept and available for every transcript and every quote, so if a phrase matters to your decision you — or a Japanese-speaking colleague — can check it against the source. We would rather you verify than take our word for it.
Who writes the questions?
We draft them from your objective; you approve them. You can rewrite any question, add your own, reorder them, or regenerate the whole guide. You review it in English, and it runs in Japanese.
Can I get a refund?
Yes, for anything you did not use. You can stop recruiting at any point and the platform fee and the incentive for every unused session are refunded to the card you paid with. A session that a participant abandons, or that fails our quality review, does not consume a slot — recruiting continues instead. If a session that was delivered to you turns out to be unusable, tell us and we will look at it.
How do I pay?
By card, through Stripe, in US dollars. We do not currently support bank transfer, purchase orders, invoicing in arrears or payment in other currencies. If your company cannot pay by card, contact us before you start.
Start with 5 interviews
You do not need to talk to us first. Write your objective, look at the guide we draft from it, set your audience, and see the exact price before you decide. 5 sessions with the $14 incentive is $315, and if we cannot fill them you get all of it back.
Questions first? Contact us — we answer in English.