The firms we talk to with clients in Japan describe the same problem, whether they are three preparers in a Chicago suburb or a bilingual practice in Tokyo. The return itself is not hard. It is a Form 1040, the individual income tax return, maybe a Form 2555, the foreign earned income exclusion form, maybe a Form 1116, the foreign tax credit form. What is hard is everything upstream of the return: a stack of documents in a language nobody in the office reads, each one carrying a number the return needs.
The documents that actually show up
A client living in Japan does not send a W-2. They send a 源泉徴収票 (gensen-choshu-hyo) — the year-end withholding statement their employer issues every January, printed almost entirely in Japanese, with a Reiwa-era year in the corner instead of 2026. If they filed their own Japanese return, there is a 確定申告書 (kakutei-shinkoku) behind it. If they own an apartment, a 住民税 (juminzei, resident tax) notice from the ward office. If they hold a Japanese brokerage account, a 特定口座 (tokutei koza) report with gains figures that need to become either PFIC disclosures or ordinary income, depending on what the account actually holds.
None of that is exotic to a preparer who reads Japanese. It is exotic to almost everyone else, which is most of the CPA and EA firms doing this work today.
What the documents are actually deciding
Every one of those documents is quietly answering a US filing question the preparer still has to ask.
- Does the brokerage account hold a PFIC, a passive foreign investment company, which triggers Form 8621 — and if so, which election?
- Does the resident-tax notice change the foreign tax credit calculation on Form 1116?
- Does an NISA or iDeCo account, Japan's tax-advantaged investment and retirement wrappers, need an FBAR, the foreign bank account report, or a Form 8938, the foreign asset disclosure, at all — or does the US-Japan totalization agreement change the answer for pension contributions?
- Does Article 17 of the US-Japan tax treaty change how a Japanese pension gets reported?
- Is Form 2555 even the right call once the resident-tax and withholding numbers are in, or does Form 1116 leave the client better off?
A preparer who cannot read the source document is answering these questions from what the client remembers. That is not where a filing position should come from.
How the Desk handles it
We built a Japan-specific intake for exactly this problem. The client, or the firm on the client’s behalf, uploads the Japanese originals through the taxpayer portal: the withholding statement, the resident-tax notice, the brokerage report, whatever came in the mail that year. The extraction reads the document and returns it as structured data in both languages, side by side — the Japanese as printed, and the English a preparer actually needs: employer, gross pay, withholding, era-year converted to the calendar year the IRS expects.
The same pass flags what the numbers imply — a brokerage balance that looks like it sits inside a PFIC, an NISA account that needs an FBAR conversation, a pension that touches Article 17. None of that replaces the preparer’s judgment. It puts the judgment in front of the right facts, in English, on the first read.
Who this is for
This is not only for firms in the US with a handful of clients who happen to live in Japan. It works the same way for a bilingual practice based in Japan serving American clients directly, or a US firm with a Japan office. The document does not care where the preparer sits. It cares whether the preparer can read it.
If your firm has even one client filing from Japan, the honest question is not whether you can find someone who reads Japanese. It is whether every preparer in the building needs to be that person, or whether the intake can do that work once and hand your preparer the answer.
The Desk reviews Japan-sourced returns the same way it reviews every return — two enrolled agents, one file, one signature-ready draft.