Resend launched a Tokyo region this year. Its pricing page still has no yen option, no 特定商取引法 (Specified Commercial Transactions Act) notice, and no hreflang="ja". I ran it through a scanner I'm building, along with fourteen other funded dev tools, reading each site the way a Japanese user's browser would.
Fifteen tools. All fifteen scored F. The mean was 15 out of 100.
| Tool | Score | Tool | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend | 21 | Render | 16 |
| Dub | 21 | Vercel | 16 |
| Linear | 21 | Cline | 16 |
| Liveblocks | 21 | PostHog | 11 |
| Documenso | 20 | Trigger.dev | 5 |
| Cal.com | 19 | Upstash | 4 |
| Supabase | 17 | Inngest | 0 |
| Railway | 17 |
The spread runs from Inngest at 0 to a cluster at 21. Even Vercel, with a Tokyo and an Osaka region, lands at 16. The point isn't any single score. It's that fifteen independent teams left the same things out.
What the scanner actually checks
It reads the public marketing site, not the backend. It looks for signals: an hreflang="ja" alternate, a 特商法 disclosure page (legally required to sell to Japanese consumers), an invoice-registration number (the インボイス system, mandatory since 2023), yen pricing, and CJK typesetting on any Japanese text it finds.
What it can't tell you: whether the company has a Japanese entity, or whether a page that exists is legally complete. I can detect that a 特商法 page is absent. Whether a present one holds up is a human call, and I won't pretend otherwise.
So read the scores as directional, not as a verdict. An F here means "this site is not set up to sell in Japan," not "this company failed at anything."
The Japan-shaped hole
hreflang="ja": missing on all fifteen. 特商法: missing on all fifteen. An invoice number: missing on all fifteen. These aren't obscure. They're the front door for selling software to Japan.
The reason they're all missing is the same reason. From outside Japan, they're structurally invisible. You don't add a yen field you never needed. You don't add a 特商法 row because nothing in your stack ever asked for it. Resend putting a region in Tokyo and still pricing in dollars only is the whole pattern in one line: the infrastructure intent is there, the Japan-shaped layer on top isn't.
That's not a flaw. It's a blind spot, and a blind spot is a market most teams can't see from where they're standing.
Why I'm counting
I'm building a free scanner that turns a URL into a Japan-readiness report. This is the first batch of fifteen. I'll keep scanning, keep the numbers public, and let the index grow over time, so the question has a repeatable answer: how far is this product from being sellable in Japan.
If you work on one of these and want the full per-gap breakdown, it's yours. I'm mapping the hole, not dunking on anyone standing in it.
Faceless dev in Tokyo. I find the Japan-shaped holes in global software and write down what's broken. Scanner: https://japan-readiness.glovrex.com · the running index: https://japan-readiness.glovrex.com/report.
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