Japan Business Ready: Essential Japanese Phrases and Etiquette for Professional Travel

Lisa M Escobar is a cross-cultural communication specialist and Japanese language educator with over fifteen years of experience helping professionals navigate the complexities of doing business in Japan. She first moved to Tokyo in 2009 on a Japanese government research fellowship, where she studied Japanese linguistics and business communication at Waseda University. Over the following decade, she worked as a corporate language trainer for multinational firms including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Goldman Sachs Japan, designing curriculum focused on keigo mastery, cross-cultural negotiation, and business writing conventions.

Lisa is the founder of Bridge Language Strategies, a consultancy that prepares executives and teams for successful engagements with Japanese partners. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies launching joint ventures in Japan to small and medium-sized enterprises seeking their first distribution agreements in the Japanese market. She has delivered workshops at the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, the European Business Council, and the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).

Her approach combines rigorous language instruction with deep cultural immersion, drawing on her own experience of navigating the Japanese business world as a foreign professional. She holds a Master of Arts in Japanese Linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is a certified trainer in the Business Japanese Proficiency Test (BJT) framework. She currently divides her time between Tokyo and San Francisco, where she continues to develop training programs, write about Japanese business culture, and coach professionals preparing for their first — or their hundredth — business trip to Japan.

*Japan Business Ready* is her first book.