How to Write an RFQ Japanese Manufacturers Will Actually Answer

Why a reasonable-sounding RFQ gets ignored

An RFQ that reads fine to a buyer in English can still be unusable to the person who has to quote it. A Japanese manufacturer’s engineering or sales team is deciding, in the first 30 seconds, whether they have enough to even estimate a price. If they don’t, the common response isn’t a clarifying question back to you — it’s to move on to the next email in the queue, because chasing an underspecified foreign inquiry is low-priority work for someone already busy. The fix isn’t a better sales pitch. It’s removing every reason they’d have to set it aside.

What has to be in it

• A drawing, not just a description. “A bracket, roughly 50mm, in aluminum” cannot be quoted. A dimensioned drawing or 3D file with tolerances can.
• Material and finish, called out explicitly. Alloy grade, surface treatment, and any relevant standard (JIS, ASTM) — don’t assume a generic material name resolves to one thing.
• Quantity per order and annual volume. A manufacturer tooled for 10,000-unit runs will often not bother replying to a 50-unit prototype request rather than say so — stating your real volume up front routes you to a supplier who actually wants the job.
• Target price, if you have one. This isn’t a negotiating weakness. It tells the supplier immediately whether they’re in the right range, which gets you a real answer faster than a blind quote.
• Your intended Incoterm and destination. See Incoterms and export documents if you’re not sure what to specify here.
• A realistic timeline. Both for the quote itself and for the order — “urgent” without a date is not a timeline.

Format and tone

Keep the email short and put the drawing and key numbers in the body or a clearly labeled attachment, not buried in a paragraph. A brief, factual introduction — who you are, what your company does, why you’re sourcing from Japan — helps, but two sentences is enough; the drawing and numbers are what actually gets it quoted. Overly casual language reads as less serious to a manufacturer weighing whether an inquiry is worth engineering time. Formal, direct, and specific outperforms friendly and vague.

Sending it in Japanese matters more than it should have to

An RFQ sent in Japanese to a named contact — rather than English to a general inbox — measurably changes response rates, independent of how good the RFQ itself is. This isn’t about translation quality; it’s about the inquiry reaching someone positioned to act on it instead of sitting in a shared inbox no one owns.

If you don't hear back

Silence after the first message is common and rarely means no. A follow-up after about a week, referencing the original RFQ and offering to answer questions by phone, recovers a meaningful share of inquiries that looked dead. If a second follow-up also goes nowhere, that’s a more reliable signal to move to the next candidate than a single non-response ever is.