We are a German-Japanese company offering our website in English, German and Japan. We have been testing the different markets over the last year. What we have learned so far is:
1. Japanese have an extreme affection for foreign products
2. There is considerably less competition for online services than in the USA
3. SEO is comparably easy
1. # The iPhone was predicted to fail miserably in Japan. Well as it turns out Japanese are buying them like crazy.
# Japan is one of the biggest markets for Twitter.
# When I talk to other people about Facebook, they have never tried it, but most have heard of it. It is perceived as "this cool new thing from the USA".
# When I listen to conversations between Japanese I often hear "It is from America" to impress the other person.
# More than 90% of all Japanese women poses a Louis Vuitton product http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/164421461....
2. As the Author pointed out, the desktop market is considerably smaller than the Ketai market. I believe this explains why Japanese websites are from comparably lower quality. Not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the content perspective. There are just not as much people fighting for customers, hence the standards are about 4-7 years behind what one sees in the US web-market.
3. Until now, we did not dedicate any serious efforts to SEO. So far, for every visitor Google sends us from the USA, we get 10 from Japan.
My explanation for this is again, low competition.
The hardest part is actually getting someone to write in Japanese. The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published. (I guess this might serve as one of the explanations why there is not as much competition in the Japanese online market)
> The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published.
The key to communicating is that it doesn't have to be perfect. Most Americans don't have a good enough command of English to write publishable material, but that doesn't stop them. In fact, in areas like politics, we glorify those who talk like an uneducated person by saying they "understand the common man" better.
I absolutely agree with you. Personally, I think mistakes are acceptable as long as the work is valuable.
I am not not a native English speaker and to make matters worse dyslexic, yet write.
For Japanese it is a "culture thing". Japan is a shame-based society and in their minds, mistakes have to be avoided at all costs. They rather do the save thing and avoid writing publicly altogether.
I think Japan's general economic malaise over the past few decades have been off-putting for investors and entrepreneurs that do not look for only a sizable market, but the promise of a GROWING sizable market. With an aging population, general economic slowdown, rigid labour market and social contracts that are very specific within the Japanese context, this is not all too encouraging for outsiders.
Although I would think that for businesses operating in the seniors' product and services sector, robotics, or artificial intelligence, to name a few, Japan would be the frontier and would be much more attractive to explore. So it would depend very much on the product, the team behind the product, status quo in the domestic market, etc.
But the discussion over whether it's worthwhile to tame the Japanese market reminds me of this article (http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2011/02/whatever-happened...) that asks why the world's collective attention has shifted away from Japan in recent years.
An interesting article. I am definitely guilty of ignoring all the non-English speaking countries, not just because of the language barrier, but because I'm fearful that I just won't be able to fit in well with the culture.
A lot of FB's trouble can also be attributed to Mixi essentially curb stomping them early on, and then people in Japan getting quite tired of "socially connecting" because of it.
Facebook thrives in much of the western world because it's key feature is over-simplicity. Computer illiterate people feel well at home using facebook.
In a country with a high number of early adopters, they're likely more interested in useful apps over simple apps.
my wife is from tokyo and hasn't been in the US for long. she still doesn't consider this her home, and we live in tokyo for 3 months of the year.
anyway, i mention this because i think she's a fairly good representative of the upper-middle class segment in japan, as are her friends. they have almost no interest in facebook. part of that is due to the fact the japanese have ameba.jp and mixi, which have been around for a while and seem to be the social networking sites of choice in japan.
also, when i've asked my wife why she dislikes facebook so much, it usually comes down to privacy concerns. she's got her account locked down, but she's annoyed she even has to do this (and continually check it to make sure things haven't changed). she also doesn't like having to grant applications the ability to access her account in order to use them.
I was under the impression it had more to do with Facebook's policy of requiring real names. Most Japanese users do not use their real identities online.
1. Japanese have an extreme affection for foreign products
2. There is considerably less competition for online services than in the USA
3. SEO is comparably easy
1. # The iPhone was predicted to fail miserably in Japan. Well as it turns out Japanese are buying them like crazy. # Japan is one of the biggest markets for Twitter. # When I talk to other people about Facebook, they have never tried it, but most have heard of it. It is perceived as "this cool new thing from the USA". # When I listen to conversations between Japanese I often hear "It is from America" to impress the other person. # More than 90% of all Japanese women poses a Louis Vuitton product http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/164421461....
2. As the Author pointed out, the desktop market is considerably smaller than the Ketai market. I believe this explains why Japanese websites are from comparably lower quality. Not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the content perspective. There are just not as much people fighting for customers, hence the standards are about 4-7 years behind what one sees in the US web-market.
3. Until now, we did not dedicate any serious efforts to SEO. So far, for every visitor Google sends us from the USA, we get 10 from Japan. My explanation for this is again, low competition.
The hardest part is actually getting someone to write in Japanese. The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published. (I guess this might serve as one of the explanations why there is not as much competition in the Japanese online market)