Is confidence in the Yen going down at all? I heard that the central bank recently started increasing inflation a lot.
Yeah, now central bank of Japan is spreading many many Yen.
In Japan, the reason for having bitcoin is speculation or investment (most of Japanese don't like it very much), not using in daily life.
Moreover there were too many bad news, like Mt.gox, bitstamp, etc.
Many people cannot understand the technology of bitcoin, and why bad news were occured.
They are thinking bitcoin is like Enten(円天) , which was the pseudo money
created by company which cheated many people in Japan.
But I believe that bitcoin will make many innovations, like bitcoin 2.0.
Investment, or adjusting economic parameters (i.e. adjusting amount of money, rate of intests,etc)
make someone happy, but others unhappy.
Only innovations make everyone happy.
Nobody will igonore what will make them happy.