【英語】Deeply Local, Directly Connected to the World

Reflections on the business model of a solo professional practice

From time to time, I find myself thinking about how my practice has evolved into what it is today.

I am a Japanese tax accountant.

My work is rooted in Japanese tax law, Japanese corporate systems, and Japanese administrative procedures. The qualification itself exists within the Japanese legal and institutional framework. In that sense, my work is extremely local.

At the same time, many of my clients are international. Some are foreign entrepreneurs running businesses in Japan; others have personal or professional connections spanning Japan and other countries.

So while the substance of my work is deeply Japanese, the way people enter my practice is increasingly international.

I have come to think that this apparent contradiction may actually be one of the defining characteristics of my practice.

Being international does not mean becoming less local

I used to associate international work with becoming independent of place — creating work that could be done from anywhere in the world.

The digital nomad is perhaps the clearest example of this idea.

My work, however, operates somewhat differently.

Much of the value I can offer comes precisely from knowing Japan.

I understand Japanese tax law.
I understand how Japanese companies operate within the legal framework.
I understand how Japanese administrative systems work.
And beyond what is written in legislation and official guidance, I have practical knowledge of how things are actually handled.

All of this is highly local knowledge.

For that reason, becoming less connected to Japan would not necessarily make my work more international. In fact, the opposite may be true.

The deeper my roots are in the local system, the more useful it becomes to build bridges from that system to the outside world.

That seems to be a better model for the kind of work I do.

Language as a bridge to the outside world

Foreign languages have been one of the most important ways of building those bridges.

Doing business in Japan as a foreigner involves more than simply understanding Japanese tax rules.

Before discussing tax law itself, I sometimes need to explain assumptions or systems that people in Japan take for granted. When a language barrier is added on top of those institutional differences, communication between a client and a professional can easily require interpreters or additional intermediaries.

Using English allows me to shorten that distance.

A client can ask me a question directly. I can understand the context behind it, consider how the issue is treated from the Japanese side, and explain it back to the client.

For a small professional practice, being able to make that round trip without placing someone else in the middle is surprisingly valuable.

More recently, I have also been studying Chinese.

I am not yet at a level where I can use it freely in professional work. But learning another language has already reminded me that language does much more than increase the number of people with whom we can speak.

It gives us more direct access to another society — its information, assumptions, conversations and ways of seeing things.

For me, a foreign language is therefore not simply a communication skill.

It is a bridge into another society.

In a solo practice, investing in yourself is investing in the business

There is another aspect of this model that comes from running a solo professional practice.

In a large company, the organisation and its employees are separate.

A company may invest in an employee's language training, but if that employee leaves, the skills acquired leave with them.

A solo practice works differently.

When I improve my English, the English-language capability of my practice improves with me.

As I learn Chinese, the range of Chinese-language information and perspectives accessible to my practice gradually expands.

When I study institutions abroad or speak with people working within different systems, those experiences belong to me personally — but they also become knowledge that can inform my professional work.

In a solo practice, therefore,

investment in the individual and investment in the business overlap to a remarkable degree.

This can be a vulnerability of working alone, but it is also one of its most interesting advantages.

What looks inefficient can become an asset

Working across languages and cultures is not always the fastest way to work.

Explaining something to a person who does not share the same institutional assumptions can take considerably longer than explaining it to someone who does.

At first glance, this looks inefficient.

But I have found that the process itself often produces something valuable.

A question from a client can make me reconsider a Japanese system I had previously taken for granted.

Explaining a rule clearly may force me to revisit something I thought I understood.

Comparing Japan with another country can reveal characteristics of the Japanese system that are difficult to see from inside it.

The immediate task may take longer, but the knowledge gained does not disappear when that task is finished. It becomes part of the expertise I can draw on the next time I encounter a similar problem.

For a solo professional, therefore, eliminating every apparent inefficiency may not always be the most useful form of optimisation.

Some inefficient experiences eventually become intellectual assets.

AI has expanded the range of a solo practice

Another major change in recent years has been AI.

Running a practice alone involves a surprising amount of work beyond the core professional task.

Checking foreign-language writing.
Researching an unfamiliar system.
Organising information.
Structuring ideas.
Comparing possible approaches.

Individually, these tasks may be small. Collectively, they consume a considerable amount of time.

AI has significantly reduced the burden of some of this work.

This does not mean delegating professional judgement or client relationships to AI. Those remain my responsibility.

What has changed is the amount of supporting work that one person can reasonably manage.

Activities that might once have required several people can now, to some extent, be maintained within a much smaller practice.

I do not think AI will make organisations unnecessary. There are many things that organisations can do precisely because they are organisations.

But for people who naturally prefer to think independently and work autonomously, AI has significantly expanded the range within which a solo practice can operate.

Low reproducibility is not necessarily a weakness

Conventional business thinking places great value on reproducibility.

Processes are standardised. Teams are expanded. Ideally, the organisation eventually functions independently of its founder.

For a business seeking scale, this makes perfect sense.

My practice probably sits somewhere near the opposite end of that spectrum.

My professional expertise, languages, interests, experiences and way of working have gradually become part of the practice itself.

That makes the practice difficult to scale — and difficult to hand over to someone else in exactly the same form.

I used to see that mainly as a limitation.

I am no longer sure that it is.

Scale is not the only thing I want from a business.

I want to build a financially sustainable practice.

I want to maintain and deepen my professional expertise.

I want to continue learning about things that genuinely interest me.

I want to work on problems that are worth thinking about.

And I want the work I do today to create more possibilities for what I can do tomorrow.

If a small practice can achieve those things simultaneously, becoming a large organisation is not necessarily the only meaningful definition of growth.

Deeply local, directly connected

Looking at my practice this way, I do not think its defining characteristic is simply that it is "international."

It may be something slightly different:

to possess deeply local expertise while being able to connect directly with the outside world.

The goal is not to make my work identical wherever I happen to be.

It is to remain deeply rooted in Japan, while gradually building more bridges outward from that base.

Foreign languages create some of those bridges.

Technology creates others.

Clients, travel, study and encounters with different systems create still more.

And what I learn through those connections eventually comes back into the practice, changing the way I understand my own field.

Perhaps that is the business model I have been building without consciously designing it from the beginning:

to remain local, while becoming increasingly connected.

And to allow each new connection to deepen, rather than dilute, the expertise at the centre of the practice.

Editor’s Note

The ideas, experiences and views expressed in this article are my own. The article was developed through conversations with AI, which was used to help organise, structure and edit my thoughts into their final written form

ぜひ、こちらもどうぞ！

新しいメニュー始めました！

日本で日本語以外で仕事をしたい方

（税理士の先生含む）

に向けたメニューです。

私は、独立時の顧問先件数０件、

独立時の英会話レベルはほぼ０でした。

英語圏への留学経験は現在もありません。

この状況からスタートし、

現在では、ほとんどのクライアント様が外国の方です。

仕事での使用言語は英語とフランス語。

今は、中国語を仕事で使えるようになるために

勉強しています。

そんな私と話してみたい方向けのメニューになります。

参加してくださる方の

・思考整理

・キャリア設計

・海外案件の取り方

・税理士としての独立ライフ

の助けになれば幸いです。

私のプロフィール

京都市の女性税理士です。

税理士になるまでの苦労が綴ってあります。

税理士試験はうまくいかないことばかりで、

何度も自暴自棄になっています。

私の税理士事務所