Topic: Where are the Japanese? (Read 3540 times)

why would they need to learn if everyone trying to learn japanese

I like the vision expressed in the OP, only I would compare Bitcoin to a financial A-bomb.
If Satoshi is really Japaneze (and I like the recent hypothesis that he might be Shinichi Mochizuki) then release of Bitcoin was Japan's response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What goes around comes around, eh?

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.

Most of the younger generation and those concentrated in major cities know English but this declines rather rapidly as you branch out.

Doesnt everyone study English in school?

I think its because mining isnt really viable given high electricity prices and highly limited space in the urban areas...

Most of those troops are getting relocated to Guam.

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)

Good question, OP.

Here's the Google Trends data for Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of the word "Bitcoin":

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%E6%AF%94%E7%89%B9%E5%B8%81%2C%20%E3%83%93%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E3%82%B3%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%2C%20%EB%B9%84%ED%8A%B8%EC%BD%94%EC%9D%B8&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q

As you can see, China has learned that Bitcoin exists in the past two months, but searches in Korean are still at approximately zero, and Japanese has so few searches it can't even be graphed.

EDIT: Hmm, it seems that "Bitcoin" is more popular in Japan than "ビットコイン". (Japanese Wikipedia uses "Bitcoin", for example.) That makes it a bit more difficult to graph just Japanese searches.

This. And what's indisputable is that the value of the yen has risen since 1985. 1 dollar could buy you 250 yen in 1985 but only 100 yen now (and that's after the strenuous efforts of the Japanese govt to weaken the currency). That's a massive increase in purchasing power. Is there any other fiat currency that has been increasing it's buying power like that?

My feeling is that bitcoin will go mainstream in places like Argentina first, where the purchasing power of the currency is diminishing by the day, and Japan last.

Depends on how long a "period of years" is, as the charts seem to indicate that it takes a period of years for inflation or deflation to occur.

Japan does have inflation, the charts you presented are manipulated propaganda.   If you have lived in Japan over a period of years then you would have seen the cost of food, water/energy/utilities rise slowly, that is inflation.   

Japan doesn't have hyper-inflation. They don't even have inflation. They are in a state of deflation - see the following chart:



The only reason the graph has turned up a bit at the end is because that nuclear power plant explosion put up electricity prices.

Compare to the chart of US inflation:



Also take a look at this chart of the dollar v yen:



The value of their currency has more than doubled since 1985! Their attempts to weaken it hasn't even taken them back to 2008 levels. This is a strong, hard currency.

I guess they are worried about the end game because they have unusual demographics - more than half their population is old, which exerts deflationary pressures by themselves. Now their overall population is starting to drop and they're scared that if they don't at least get back to 2005 levels, they won't be able to cope.

To answer OP's question: only when they get back to their 1985 dollar:yen value, will the Japanese start looking for other currencies... And the likelihood they'll actually succeed in weakening that far is slim to none. Their currency is harder than Bitcoin. I expect they'll be the last place to adopt it because of the deflationary nature of their own currency.

Don't get mad so quickly.  It is true that culturally today the majority of people in power don't step out of line, or encourage it.  It is also true that the next generation is more American (especially in their waist line), but those people have yet to reach to any prominence of power yet in the system.

Let's try to talk this out with out calling each other names, or getting mad.

i asked quite few japanese when i was in japan months back, they never heard bitcoin or others.

Abe adm trying to cost inflation

who doesnt love hyper-inflation

why would he/she/they give him/her/them a Japanese name in that case? wouldnt john doe be more apt?

True, which is why I don't really believe the conspiracy theory, it's just thought provoking.
I definitely am trying to understand the reasons Bitcoin isn't bigger in Japan, but I don't think an authoritarian culture is the answer.

got love  Abe administration

either way, if Bitcoin is a secret Japanese gov stealth operation, that wouldn't explain the apparent disinterest of unsuspecting Japanese cool tech kids either.