Japan is already the new china in terms of bitcoin adoption. I was in Japan 2 months back , and almost everyone knows about bitcoins. However, there hasn't been a mass adoption for the shops to accept it yet. But bitcoin craze is already there.
Oh, really? Who did you talk to? What is their background? How many coins did each person you talked to hold? How much JPY do they plan to invest in it? Sure they "know" about it or have heard of it - MtGox and Teramoto-san took care of that.
I really would like to see some hard proof of the claims stated in this thread. I will give you some against in the meanwhile:
BtcBox is currently the biggest exchange of the ones that publish their numbers. They have a daily volume of 200 coins. Bitstamp does 12'000 (the whole Chinese 0 fee model makes for an obvious bot show).
There was an bitcoin ATM in a restaurant in Shibuya. It has been removed. Talking to some business owners that accept BTC, sales in BTC are not exactly stellar.
A quick look at coinmap.org shows the number of places that accept BTC is indeed growing, but not exactly at a spectacular pace. I think we had 35 in spring and we're at 43 now. But then the places that accept BTC didn't neither grow exponentially in China during the "China" bubble.
The majority of "for" arguments brought forward in this thread have been in place last year already. So why did it not happen last year already? Why would it happen this year?