Linux in Japan?

I’ve just returned from a great trip to see my colleagues at Gass Valley (Canopus) in Kobe Japan.  They make the MediaEdge IPTV system.  My company (PRN) uses their technology as part of our in-store advertising system.  I’ve never worked with a more capable partner.  They are smart, their systems work as promised, they deliver on time, and they are really great to work with.  I always enjoy my time with them.  This trip my friend and colleague Yutaka Isaji took me to a baseball game (Orix Buffaloes VS Chiba Lotte Marines). I’m a huge fan of baseball so this was quite a treat for me.  Here’s a picture:

Orix Buffaloes vs Chiba Lotte Marines - Sept 4, 2009

They also took me out to amazing dinners – fantastic Kobe Beef of course, but also to a traditional Japanese dinner that was a feast!  The Octopus was especially good:

Octopus in Kobe - Sept 2, 2009

But that’s not what I wanted to write about today.  While I was there I had a very interesting discussion with my friend and colleague Kyoji Oishi about Linux.  Apparently Linux has very little market share in Japan.  This shocked me.  I did some consulting a decade ago for a company based in Tokyo about the emerging market for Linux (emerging in 1997) and of course here in the US no self-respecting startup would consider using Windows!  If they did, they’d never get the great Engineers to come work for them.  It seems incredible that Japanese companies would not be very anxious to adopt Linux – and to create market pressure on vendors for Linux versions of server software.

But in the course of our conversation we had some realizations.  The Japanese have three different writing systems:

• Kanji, ideographs from Chinese characters,
• Hiragana, a set of symbols (syllabary) that approximate syllables that make up words, and
• Katakana, another syllabary used for foreign borrowings and other sounds.

(source:  Wikipedia).  I’ve heard it said that Japanese is the hardest language in the world to learn to write, based purely on the vast number of characters one must learn.  Microsoft has spent to large amount of money and time to support this writing.  Linux, for the most part, has not.  Essentially, if you want to use Linux in Japan, you need to learn English.  It’s amazing how many people in Japan do speak English.  I’m constantly embarrased that vast number of Japanese (at the airport, busses, hotels, restaraunts) can speak basic English, and so few Americans know a second language.  I certainly don’t, though I know a dozen words or so in a few other languages (that’s why I send my kids to a school where they get a second language every day starting from kindergarden).  But to be able to use Linux in Japan, you basically need English.  That’s a fairly high bar for the average Japanese… and certainly from a business perspective it would be very expensive to adopt Linux if you had to train all your staff in another language.  Imagine yourself the CTO of a company in the US and you became aware of an altternative to Windows that was growing in popularity, open source, cheaper than Windows… but your staff had to know Japanese to use it.  Non-starter.  Why would it be any different in Japan?  Or China, or Israel, or Russia, or anywhere with a langage that uses characters other than the basic Western Latin-based alphabet.

The entrepreneur in me sees a huge opportunity for a professional software package – perhaps for Red Hat or Ubuntu – that solves this problem for the Japanese market by enabling full Japanese character support in Linux.  But the realist in me sees just how difficult this would be.  That’s probably why it’s not been done yet.

What do you think?  What’s holding back Linux in other parts of the world?