"japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture."
I don't think that's the issue here - if you look at the popularity of file sharing software like Winny, it's pretty clear that a lot of people will happily ignore authority if they think they're doing it anonymously.
Topic: Why is Bitcoin not popular in Japan? - page 2. (Read 3377 times)
japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture.
Japanese children are more harshly punished for questioning authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. 
Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto has claimed that he is of Japanese origin. Yet Bitcoin has very minimal influence in Japan, the 3rd largest economy in the world.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.
japanese people tend to be more willing to trust authority than probably any other group of people on the planet. The legitimacy of ridgedly defined hierarchy is deeply engrained in their culture.
Considering that satoshi choose a japanese sounding name there is a very very tiny chance that he's from Japan.
Japan is a little bit insulated from tech trends that start out in the English-speaking world. A lot of this is just the language barrier.
Also, as somebody said up-thread, payment works reasonably well here already. For physical goods sold online you have a nice cash-on-delivery system using Japan's very efficient delivery services, and for electronic payments you can easily just wire money directly from your bank account to theirs either from an ATM or from your PC. A lot of businesses will have accounts with several of the bigger banks so that you don't need to transfer between banks, which can make the payment instant and cheap or free.
That said, I think we'll see some take-up where either side of the payment is international, or where you want to make anonymous / pseudonymous payments for whatever reason.
Also, as somebody said up-thread, payment works reasonably well here already. For physical goods sold online you have a nice cash-on-delivery system using Japan's very efficient delivery services, and for electronic payments you can easily just wire money directly from your bank account to theirs either from an ATM or from your PC. A lot of businesses will have accounts with several of the bigger banks so that you don't need to transfer between banks, which can make the payment instant and cheap or free.
That said, I think we'll see some take-up where either side of the payment is international, or where you want to make anonymous / pseudonymous payments for whatever reason.
Most ppl will never know nor care. This is like asking why dodge vipers are popular in europe. The best thing to do is figure why you like bitcoins so much and "focus" on that.
There are several contributing factors here. First off, Satoshi is almost certainly not a Japanese national. He might be ethnicly Japanese, but I would question even that. He originally used British spelling and grammer, and did not suffer from the gramatical quirks of a native Japanese speaker. Add to that the fact that there were zero translations of the White Paper into Japanese for at least 18 months after it's release, and it's easy to assume that Satoshi isn't a native Japanese speaker.
Furthermore, Bitcoin doesn't really offer much new to the trade culture in Japan. As a society, they tend to be very cash & local trade biased, and even online shopping isn't (demographicly) as big in Japan as it is in the (much more geographicly diverse) United States. Sure, they use the Internet to decide what to get, but oftentimes they can order the item online and pick it up at a store within a local travel distance for cash. Walmart.com uses a similar model. Even when they do trade electronicly, they actually have more advanced forms of electronic commerce than is presently available in the US or Europe, already having NFC enabled smartphones and such. In the US, the credit card industry has been secretly resisting moving away from the plastic card model and towards the smartphone app model because they have a huge vested interest in the prior model, while companies like Google have a head start in the latter model.
Furthermore, Bitcoin doesn't really offer much new to the trade culture in Japan. As a society, they tend to be very cash & local trade biased, and even online shopping isn't (demographicly) as big in Japan as it is in the (much more geographicly diverse) United States. Sure, they use the Internet to decide what to get, but oftentimes they can order the item online and pick it up at a store within a local travel distance for cash. Walmart.com uses a similar model. Even when they do trade electronicly, they actually have more advanced forms of electronic commerce than is presently available in the US or Europe, already having NFC enabled smartphones and such. In the US, the credit card industry has been secretly resisting moving away from the plastic card model and towards the smartphone app model because they have a huge vested interest in the prior model, while companies like Google have a head start in the latter model.
I don't mean to stereotype but lots of Japan, especially the business world is rather low tech. For example fax machines are still rather popular there. Additionally Japan has a very old population and new technology is much more popular among younger people usually.
Maybe it has and we just don't know about it 
I need to learn how to read Japanese someday 
the Japanese seem to be quite localised even on the internet from what I've seen.
I need to learn how to read Japanese someday the Japanese seem to be quite localised even on the internet from what I've seen. 
Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto has claimed that he is of Japanese origin. Yet Bitcoin has very minimal influence in Japan, the 3rd largest economy in the world.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.
I would think for a society that can produce people like Satoshi, it should have been more open to Bitcoin.
Jump to: