Japan is the world's third-largest economy. It has 1.2 million software engineers . And most of them spend their workday in Excel. Not writing code. Writing specs. In spreadsheets. I spent time researching Japan's IT industry and found five deep, structural pain points that have no good software solution yet. Each one has a clear product gap. Here they are: ## Pain #1 — Excel Hell Japanese engineers at large system integrators (called SIers) deliver Excel files as their primary output. Test case matrices, architecture diagrams, design specs — all in grid format, never in version control. 76% of Japanese companies have documentation outdated by at least one version (2026 survey). Product gap: SpecSync — a CLI that parses Excel spec files and converts them into versioned, searchable Markdown synced to Git. Open-source core, paid cloud sync. No competitor targets this workflow.…