The language discussion is pretty navel-gazey and easily falsifiable. There were loads of Japanese-market PCs in the early 90s (stuff like the MSX). Hell, Apple

The language discussion is pretty navel-gazey and easily falsifiable. There were loads of Japanese-market PCs in the early 90s (stuff like the MSX). Hell, Apple did huge pushes in Japan as well, thanks to its high-res stuff. If the language was maybe a barrier early on, it's pretty hard to argue that it continued to be so. "Something" was different, of course. And maybe there is an argument for there simply being not very many cheap machines available for the Japanese market. My pet theory is that the US in particular quickly started doing things like asking students to type up essays on computers to get them printed, and that basically served as the uber-excuse for people to all have computers at home in the US. If you want more exoticism, people in Japan are less likely to have home offices because they would just go to their real office or whatever. Less likely to play DOOM on your parent's machine or whatever. The specialized device aside is also super weird cuz it forgets to mention stuff like rental CD markets which make analog-in totally fine as a concept anyways. "Why is this problem not solved in Japan" can often be answered by "this isn't really as much of a problem because of some other incidental technical reason X, and the good-enough thing survives" (just like ACH in the US)