360 Launches In Japan 81
Gamespot reports that the 360 sold out ... at the Shibuya 'official' launch location. Sales from the rest of the country still have to come in, but given launch day experiences, I imagine the customer reaction wasn't as fierce as it was here. From the Kotaku on-hand piece: "A customer! I see a customer! It's a few minutes after seven, and somebody else has come to wait for the Xbox. I feel like a sailor who's been lost at sea and finally spots land. He stands in front of Sofmap for a moment, awkwardly, and he looks around. Nobody but him and me and the vending machine. I make a quick inventory: tall, painfully thin, wearing a brown coat, black and grey backpack, looks like Ichabod Crane."
Re:Japanese psychology (Score:5, Interesting)
Er, well for one, I hope you're not under the impression he was going to buy an Xbox 360 from a vending machine. The vending machine was incidental to the story. The guy was standing outside of Softmap, a computer/electronics store. There happened to be a vending machine there.
Guess Japan is not like NYC.
Not withstanding my comments above, though, people do buy expensive things from vending machines there - just not as part of this story.
No, Japan is not like NYC. There's crime - more than there used to be - but cops don't even carry guns there. You can walk down the street late at night without worrying about it. You can buy iPods out of isolated vending machines like this and provided you're not some little kid lost in a sea of high school bullies, you don't really have anything to be concerned about.
But this story is about a guy waiting outside of a store looking for customers... he just has a drink vending machine near him.
To get a little bit back on topic, Gamespot today has a glowing report of the sell-out in Shibuya. But honestly, this is one of MS's problems - and it's a problem western sites like Gamespot are all too eager to buy into. That is, Japan is more than Shibuya and Akihabara. Honestly. Yes, these are trendsetting areas for youngsters and tech retail, but it's like having a big launch event in Times Square in NYC and then ignoring the rest of the country and expecting anything to happen. It's just meaningless in the grand scheme of things; most of Japan - and in fact most of Tokyo - pays no attention at all to what goes on in Shibuya. MS wouldn't do that in the US - they have events all over the country, and they sponsor all sorts of things to keep the system in the public eye - but I haven't seen any reports of MS doing this in Japan. I have talked to people who live there who have said all they've seen on TV lately are PS2 and DS commercials, with maybe one or two Xbox 360 commercials really late at night.
It all just gets back to what I still think is a very basic misunderstanding of the Japanese market. Not everybody in Japan is the same and not everybody in Japan buys things just because people in Shibuya or Akihabara buy them. MS is making a huge push to attract a very specific type of customer in one tiny little geographic area in one city in Japan, but that is not going to get them anywhere nationwide.
From someone in Japan, 360 is not popular (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in Tokyo over Thanksgiving. I saw several 360 displays, all of them were completely empty. My daughter was frustrated that she couldn't play with the DS, but she had to console herself with playing with the vacant 360 display.
I was in Toys R Us in Nagasaki yesterday and there were probably a half dozen of the empty boxes you take up to the register in order to get your gear.
Nobody is talking about the 360 outside of a few neighborhoods in Tokyo -- and those seem to care only after 3pm until midnight (which gives us a clue about the very small demographic they have attracted).
Re:Role reversal (Score:4, Interesting)
If a product has a good quality record, Japanese will buy it, regardless of the fact that it benefits other countries. Leica cameras, Harley Davidson bikes, Bose speakers, Apple iPods, BMW cars.
So, yeah, Japanese take business very seriously. And they take quality control very seriously. But they don't take deciding what country their purchases benefit very seriously. They leave that to Americans waving flags and holding placards saying "Buy American!".
The 360's failed in Japan. (Score:5, Interesting)
Most Japanese love American stuff, especially in terms of creative stuff: books and music, for example (in fact a lot of my friends listen exclusively to English music, American and/or British). I was at Tsutaya last night and there were a ton of American/English books in Japanese. Da Vinchi Code, Harry Potter, and Memoirs of A Geisha come to mind.
Having said that, the Xbox360's a failure here. No one cares that the machine is out. I didn't even know it was released (I knew it was soon, as I commented on a story before, but I didn't know the exact day). I'm outside Osaka, the second biggest city in Japan, and nothing is happening outside of Tokyo. It's nuts. Microsoft really doesn't care about getting the machine popular. Armchair American pundits say that its because the Japanese are racist against Americans. The truth is Microsoft is making zero effort to be popular in the U.S., and the normal xenophobic American response is to say its the Japanese fault.
I was in Lawson's (a convince store) this morning and there were a couple of Xbox magazines out on the shelf. I picked one up and the only games in it were games that aren't out: DoA, Mist Walker's RPG, games Japanese people are interested in, but they are not even avaliable!
And Christmas is celebrated here. Not only are there many Christians (one of my good friends is Japanese Christian, not to mention Koreans and other foreigners), but as a secular holiday, its huge. There are Christmas decorations everywhere (my favorite is the huge light up Santa near Kobe Harbor, but even in my little town there are decorations).