Ha ha! In Japan, nothing ever changes: until it does. And then it changes immediately with no transition period. All of a sudden everybody agrees to do things a different way. It floors me every time it happens.
Interest in Japan is higher than average among the software developer crowd. My wife teaches Japanese and her biggest clientele demographic is single, male engineers in their 20s.
https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/japan,s...
I computed the cosine similarity between Japan, SK, and the USA to get:
Japan-SK: 0.933
USA-Jap: 0.8315
USA-SK: 0.670
So it does appear that Japan is more similar to the US than South Korea using this metric.
I think the least surprising result of all is that Japan and South Korea are both more like each other than they are like the United States.
edit: Also, I challenge the notion that the reason was legitimate. I know the reason. But I wouldn't make that trade-off.
For all the talk of individualism, for example, it's pretty easy to blindly tell a random American from a random French with great statistical success just for their opinions on things. And those two cultures aren't even as different as each is with Japanese culture...
Interestingly, perhaps bouyed by the success of the cigarette sign, on the train they had signs of "Do it at home" with pictures of people doing makeup, or whatever. Everybody ignored it :-).
More generally, apparently sexual harassment used to be common in the workplace. I never actually saw anything extreme, but I did see a massive change in attitude. One day guys would be talking about inappropriate things at work without anyone ever saying anything and the next day when the same thing happened the section chief would be yelling at them about sexual harassment. It was literally night and day and it wasn't like there was an announcement or anything. It just went from being tolerated to not being tolerated.
I often see things on TV that makes me wonder if the government is kind of sounding people out on stuff. For example, one day they had a piece on Korean schools for ethnic Koreans whose family members were essentially abducted to Japan during WWII. The children and grandchildren (and probably great grand children now) for many of these people are still in Japan. Because the Japanese law doesn't allow dual citizenship, these people have to choose between Korean and Japanese citizenship. If they decided to choose Korean citizenship, they get permanent resident status, but not citizenship. This is considered a pretty big problem with a lot of people and so it's been a question for literally generations about what to do: should these people be granted dual citizenship? What about school systems that include Korean culture? How much should be paid by the government etc? It's a horrible mess and, of course, in Japanese style virtually nothing has been done about it (very weird to be born in a country and not have citizenship of that country)! But this NHK program was very sympathetic to the plight of these people, so it made me think that maybe a move was afoot (the NHK is not as arms length from the government as the BBC is from the UK government...). But not so far anyway.
When you used PayPay during the original campaign period they discounted purchases by 20%. At random, they would also pay the whole price, without deducting your balance.
I've been told they had a 100MUSD budget for that campaign.
Essentially they threw money at user acquisition. By using PayPay you were getting free money... it was kind of nuts not to use it.
So, it's not surprising that they gained so many users. On top of that, digital payment systems were already popular in Japan (as well as being able to use your railcard for payment, there's a bunch of store cards/other digital payment cards).