Looking at the "penetration" of bitcoin by country, I'm surprised at how low Japan is on the list. I would think that the technophilic home country of MtGox would find the Bitcoin story interesting, especially given that it was created by "Satoshi Nakamoto."
And the new quantitative easing (money-printing) policy of Abe's government should give Japanese a strong incentive to look into hedges against inflation, such as Bitcoin.
Not to mention that MtGox is located in Japan. Maybe it's because many live in small apartments where a noisy mining rig would be quite disturbing.
It is quite perplexing. I really don't think it's because of small apartments. It's mainly because nobody here has ever heard of it. The JPY market on MtGox has extremely low volume, despite the fact that it's very fast and easy to get yen onto MtGox.
The other weird thing is that foreign exchange trading works as a de facto legal gambling industry here. I don't have any good figures for the popularity, but in subways / trains / TV there are countless ads for FX trading platforms. Mostly JPY / USD / EUR I guess. Not sure if you actually get to take delivery or if it's more of a derivative like the CFD stuff which seems more popular in the EU.
But yeah. No bitcoin awareness in Japan, no media, nothing. Who knows why. Might be that people are pretty old & conservative; I wouldn't expect my grandparents, nor Warren Buffet, nor most Japanese elderly people to understand bitcoin.