Apparently a huge contributor was the complexity of their written language. English can be easily typed with a keyboard and stored in a 7 bit character. This m

Apparently a huge contributor was the complexity of their written language. English can be easily typed with a keyboard and stored in a 7 bit character. This meant the early computers could still store a reasonable amount of English, and were accessible to people straight away. Kanji on the other hand is exceedingly complex. Computers had to get much more powerful before the systems which allowed typing and reading it worked well. The barrier for entry was therefore much higher for the average person. developers in the Japanese market therefore focused on the areas of computing which didn't require written language - video games.