Japanese Business Cards - Japanese business cards for UK companies visiting Japan

Japanese business cards, Chinese business cards, Korean business cards, meishi, Arabic business cards

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We suggest that the Japanese, Chinese or Korean side of your business card is formatted horizontally as in the example below.

Some Japanese cards are formatted vertically because Japanese can be written both vertically AND horizontally, but that rarely works with double-sided cards because English cannot.

The vertical format is the more traditional of the two styles and is therefore considered to be more conservative. The horizontal format is a newer development, based on Western-style cards, and is particularly popular with Japanese graphic designers because of the greater opportunity to inject creativity into the card design.

Today in Japan the ratio between horizontal and vertical cards is probably around 80:20 (horizontal:vertical) among Japanese businessmen, with the horizontal cards increasing ever more rapidly in popularity, particularly in technology industries. The reason for this rapid shift is due largely to the computer age, of course: you can't write email and web addresses vertically so you have to put them on their side (see the example card layout above) and that looks very awkward. It also means that recipient of your card has to keep turning it in their hand in order to read it properly.

As you would expect, horizontal cards are also by far the most common among Western businessmen (well over 95%), with the Japanese side mirroring the layout of the English.

Japanese Business Cards
10a St Martin's Street, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 0AL
Tel: 020 8816 8891 Fax: 0870 135 6293
Email: info@japanese-business-cards.com