Why is Bitcoin not popular in Japan?

[kokojie]

Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto has claimed that he is of Japanese origin. Yet Bitcoin has very minimal influence in Japan, the 3rd largest economy in the world.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.

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[Lethn]

Maybe it has and we just don't know about it I need to learn how to read Japanese someday the Japanese seem to be quite localised even on the internet from what I've seen.

[niko]

Here is one past attempt:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=100676.msg1129630#msg1129630

[tehace]

I don't mean to stereotype but lots of Japan, especially the business world is rather low tech. For example fax machines are still rather popular there. Additionally Japan has a very old population and new technology is much more popular among younger people usually.

[MoonShadow]

There are several contributing factors here.  First off, Satoshi is almost certainly not a Japanese national.  He might be ethnicly Japanese, but I would question even that.  He originally used British spelling and grammer, and did not suffer from the gramatical quirks of a native Japanese speaker.  Add to that the fact that there were zero translations of the White Paper into Japanese for at least 18 months after it's release, and it's easy to assume that Satoshi isn't a native Japanese speaker.

Furthermore, Bitcoin doesn't really offer much new to the trade culture in Japan.  As a society, they tend to be very cash & local trade biased, and even online shopping isn't (demographicly) as big in Japan as it is in the (much more geographicly diverse) United States.  Sure, they use the Internet to decide what to get, but oftentimes they can order the item online and pick it up at a store within a local travel distance for cash.  Walmart.com uses a similar model.  Even when they do trade electronicly, they actually have more advanced forms of electronic commerce than is presently available in the US or Europe, already having NFC enabled smartphones and such.  In the US, the credit card industry has been secretly resisting moving away from the plastic card model and towards the smartphone app model because they have a huge vested interest in the prior model, while companies like Google have a head start in the latter model.

[LoveSosa]

Most ppl will never know nor care. This is like asking why dodge vipers are popular in europe. The best thing to do is figure why you like bitcoins so much and "focus" on that.

[edmundedgar]

Japan is a little bit insulated from tech trends that start out in the English-speaking world. A lot of this is just the language barrier.

Also, as somebody said up-thread, payment works reasonably well here already. For physical goods sold online you have a nice cash-on-delivery system using Japan's very efficient delivery services, and for electronic payments you can easily just wire money directly from your bank account to theirs either from an ATM or from your PC. A lot of businesses will have accounts with several of the bigger banks so that you don't need to transfer between banks, which can make the payment instant and cheap or free.

That said, I think we'll see some take-up where either side of the payment is international, or where you want to make anonymous / pseudonymous payments for whatever reason.

[FreeMoney]

Considering that satoshi choose a japanese sounding name there is a very very tiny chance that he's from Japan.

[Anon136]

Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto has claimed that he is of Japanese origin. Yet Bitcoin has very minimal influence in Japan, the 3rd largest economy in the world.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.

japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture.

[justusranvier]

japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture.

Japanese children are more harshly punished for questioning authority than probably any other group of people on the planet.

[edmundedgar]

"japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture."

I don't think that's the issue here - if you look at the popularity of file sharing software like Winny, it's pretty clear that a lot of people will happily ignore authority if they think they're doing it anonymously.

[Anon136]

"japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture."

I don't think that's the issue here - if you look at the popularity of file sharing software like Winny, it's pretty clear that a lot of people will happily ignore authority if they think they're doing it anonymously.

Ok but we are talking in one case about ignoring authority and in the other defying or maybe even out right combating authority. This is because it is in the economic interest of consumers to avoid the white market in intellectual property where as with bitcoin its in the economic interest of most individuals to chose the white market over the grey market that is the bitcoin community.

[kiba]

Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto has claimed that he is of Japanese origin.

Where did make that claim?

In a p2p foundation profile. http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto

He's also 37 years old.

[kiba]

Ok but we are talking in one case about ignoring authority and in the other defying or maybe even out right combating authority. This is because it is in the economic interest of consumers to avoid the white market in intellectual property where as with bitcoin its in the economic interest of most individuals to chose the white market over the grey market that is the bitcoin community.

In South Korea, students protest and riot several times to get rid of consecutive dictatorship before they have a democracy.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/05/protests-in-korea.html

Makes you wonder why the most rebellious of all people, the Korean, are not accepting bitcoin everywhere in their society. 

[Anon136]

Ok but we are talking in one case about ignoring authority and in the other defying or maybe even out right combating authority. This is because it is in the economic interest of consumers to avoid the white market in intellectual property where as with bitcoin its in the economic interest of most individuals to chose the white market over the grey market that is the bitcoin community.

In South Korea, students protest and riot several times to get rid of consecutive dictatorship before they have a democracy.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/05/protests-in-korea.html

Makes you wonder why the most rebellious of all people, the Korean, are not accepting bitcoin everywhere in their society. 

ill just put this here

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/8/9/2/48892.jpg?v=1

[kokojie]

Ok but we are talking in one case about ignoring authority and in the other defying or maybe even out right combating authority. This is because it is in the economic interest of consumers to avoid the white market in intellectual property where as with bitcoin its in the economic interest of most individuals to chose the white market over the grey market that is the bitcoin community.

In South Korea, students protest and riot several times to get rid of consecutive dictatorship before they have a democracy.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/05/protests-in-korea.html

Makes you wonder why the most rebellious of all people, the Korean, are not accepting bitcoin everywhere in their society. 

ill just put this here

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/8/9/2/48892.jpg?v=1

hah that's really bad ass

[franky1]

Considering that satoshi choose a japanese sounding name there is a very very tiny chance that he's from Japan.

alot of people think the UK is not really on the bitcoin spectrum, due to lack of knowledge, yet the 3d nodes map shows 2 area's in UK at the top yet only one in USA. closed communities where most people only speak to people around them in their native language and cultures dont really see what is happening in different languages they cannot read.

http://blockchain.info/nodes-globe
based purely on bitcoin population vs location, Europe has more bitcoin involvement than the USA.. i think its now time everyone on this international forum of bitcoin to start thinking about bitcoin as EURO valued more often then dollar valued. just to be more fair to the majority of viewers.

and as for the satoshi chatter:
considering programmers decided to call how to create a cryptocoin 'mining' has a very very tiny chance that it makes bitcoin anything like gold.

you cant melt it, bend it, make jewellery out of it, or put it onto a girls finger when asking her to marry you. bitcoin is nothing like gold.

its an asset, such as antiques or art. great to look at but useless and doing anything else but viewing and holding value. it is not a commodity like gold.

and my point.

just naming something abstract makes people totally believe that's what it must be linked to. closing their minds to the obvious evidence that its not what you first think when looking at its name.

[kiko]

No one has mentioned that Japan hasn't seen any inflation for 20 years. Broad money supply has essentially been fixed for a long long time. That takes away a pretty big selling point of bitcoin don't you think?

I'm no expert but I imagine Japan has also had pretty good mobile payment systems for decades, given that they all had smartphones when the rest of the world was could still only send picture messages if the recipient had an identical Nokia phone model!

[nobbynobbynoob]

The Japanese banksters have had a go at "quantitative easing", I believe.

[dancupid]

It is getting popular in Japan:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxJPY#igWeeklyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzcv

Once people have bitcoins I think they then speculate in dollars.