About DoRealAdvice
Updated April 2026
DoRealAdvice is part of DoSwiss Japan Co., Ltd., a cross-cultural consulting practice based in Ashiya, Hyogo. We exist to make the EU-Japan business corridor genuinely workable for the people who actually have to operate in it — not just talk about it.
What this site does
DoRealAdvice provides two things:
- Free professional utilities — currency conversion with Japanese consumption tax, a fiscal-year calendar with full Japanese holidays, and an AI-powered outreach generator that produces culturally calibrated business correspondence in Japanese, English, German, French, and Italian. These are designed for people who do real cross-border work and need accurate, fast answers.
- An AI-powered intelligence platform (Pro) — a market alerts dashboard, EU-Japan analyst chat, outreach calibration, CRM pipeline, and executive reporting, all built on Anthropic's Claude. Designed for serious operators in the corridor: family offices, mid-sized exporters, professional service firms, and corporate strategy teams.
Why we built this
After three decades of working both ends of the EU-Japan corridor — at major Swiss banks, at the helm of a Swiss trading company's Japan subsidiary, and as Honorary Consul-General of Switzerland for Western Japan from 2008 to 2021 — the same patterns of waste keep appearing. Deals that stall on misunderstood signals. Investments hampered by the wrong cultural assumptions. Time and trust burned on friction that, in 2026, simply should not exist.
The traditional consulting model addresses this with $400/hour engagements that few small and mid-sized businesses can afford. We thought the obvious tools could be free, and the AI-powered intelligence layer could be ¥2,980/month — accessible to anyone who actually does the work, not just enterprises with consulting budgets.
Who's behind this
DoRealAdvice is built and operated by Dieter Sommerhalder, founder and CEO of DoSwiss Japan Co., Ltd. His career spans the full spectrum of Swiss-Japan business:
- 30+ years of international banking with Credit Suisse and UBS
- Eight years as CEO (1997–2004) of a Swiss trading company's Osaka-headquartered Japan subsidiary
- Thirteen years as Honorary Consul-General of Switzerland for Western Japan (2008–2021)
- Vice President of the Swiss Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan (SCCIJ)
- Outside director at TSE-listed Kohoku Kogyo Co., Ltd.
- Incoming Chairperson of the Osaka Rotary Club International Service Committee for 2026–27
Finance, operations, and diplomacy — all from the Kansai region where the real work happens.
Our approach
Three principles guide what we build:
Practical over theoretical. Every tool here exists because we wished it existed when doing actual cross-border work. We do not publish frameworks; we publish utilities that solve real problems within the next five minutes.
Bilingual at the source. Anything we make should work for both sides of the corridor. The outreach generator produces Japanese that a Japanese executive would actually receive comfortably — calibrated to the recipient's seniority, the channel, the relationship state, and the regional norms.
Cost-aware. Most professional EU-Japan consulting is priced for organizations that can afford it. We try to make the obvious things free and the substantial things accessible.
Get in touch
For consulting enquiries that go beyond the free tools and the Pro app — bespoke market entry support, board advisory, due diligence on cross-border partnerships — please visit doswiss-japan.com or use the contact page.