I'm in Japan. I think the reason is very little media about Bitcoin in Japanese. English comprehension is pretty low here. (Compared to Germany, for example)
Doesnt everyone study English in school?
They do, but they most definitely do not
learn English in school.
Note that as of one month ago, Google News showed only
five news articles mentioning Bitcoin in Japanese publications, in all of history, and most of those were translations of English articles. That's extremely low awareness. I've asked around in Japan and no one had heard of it except for an older woman who saw it on that episode of The Good Wife.
I've long noted the lack of interest, and to my mind there seem to be several big reasons why there is no Bitcoin penetration in Japan:
- Payment systems are already quite sophisticated in Japan, with IC cards and Japanese mobile phones letting you just touch them to a panel to pay for all sorts of things, even vending machines
- There has long already been a nice solution for online micropayments: since most Japanese never owned a computer and instead had always used mobile phones for Internet, when they want to shop for online/digital goods they often just have the money they spend added to their phone bill through an arrangement between the merchant and the carrier
- Although Japan is very high tech, it doesn't have a culture of embracing fringe technology, nor of being aware of or interested in potentially revolutionary developments that come out of the blue rather than being incremental improvements in familiar fields. That goes double for anything that is politically interesting.
- The language barrier is indeed tremendous. Very few Japanese people feel comfortable browsing the English Internet for crowdsourced wisdom, because even the ones that can understand will usually not grasp the subtleties of the cultural context necessary to read between the lines on places like Reddit and this forum. You can imagine how difficult this is when it comes to Bitcoin, which by all accounts generally takes people weeks of online study and debate just to grasp, and longer than that to get comfortable using it.
- It takes some creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to consider how you yourself would use Bitcoin in your life and business. This kind of thing is, stereotypically and in actual fact, the kind of thing most Japanese would typically avoid.
- Since it requires a network effect and since most Japanese only know other Japanese, there is little motivation to start the seed for commerce and such. No consumers know about Bitcoin, no one buys your stuff. Investment is another story, though, and there seem to be a few Japanese investors, I gather mostly thanks to Roger Ver's efforts.
Japan will only get interested once it makes big mainstream waves, and maybe even then it'll be delayed for a few years like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
The first step would be some kind of Bitcoin for Dummies written in Japanese. It'd have to cover Armory, change addresses, etc. etc. It'd be better if it were in friendly Japanese style as well, with friendly illustrations and cartoon characters helping you avoid common pitfalls. It'd probably be a good investment to hire a translator and graphic designer to do this, because it would plant the seed for a whole lot of people buying BTC. Japanese are aware of the problems of Abenomics and have been purchasing gold, so it's not totally out of the question, but until magazines and TV are telling Japanese people to invest in Bitcoin, there will be little interest - unless there's some kind of killer app that allows you to get away with something you otherwise couldn't - ala WinnyMX.
