Add to this, we tend to don't need PC for life (but is needed for office work). Nintendo and Sony is headquartered here (technically SIE is now HQ'd in the US but most people don't know) so PC gaming isn't a huge thing (but now it'S growing). Tax filling isn't needed for normal sararyman. Urban homes are tend to small. Schools are really behind for everything. People tend to not good at English.
My working class dad who had like 8 years of formal education in his entire life taught himself visual basic in the 90s through magazines and books. Getting emails from students who could theoretically just type stuff into google at 1 am was a genuine shocker to me.
(this is Germany in my case)
This was also true back in 2006 when I took Computer Engineering (in Canada). Installing an OS was never trivial.
First, Japan had a mindblowing consumer electronics industry way before we did. There were special purpose devices for everything you could want. They were all user friendly and did not require understanding how the underlying system worked. They didn't need a PC since all their electronic needs were already met and met better.
Second, Japan is basically 99% urban living, as space is at an insane premium, and even when you are in the country the houses are built small due to culture and lack of open space, since if you're not in the city you're probably in the mountains. This means there was no physical place to even put a PC in most Japanese houses the way American houses might have a desk in a corner or even an office.
Third, and probably the most important, phone calls in Japan were always pay by minute, even for local calls. This meant that if you were online with a modem, you were paying the phone bill just sitting there. This meant that if a person even had a modem, the would rarely use the internet. Since America had monthly-billed phones, there was no problem staying up all night on AOL chatrooms, and AOL really was the killer app that pushed PCs into American houses.
IMO this is why the PC revolution that really took off in American homes, and by association a bunch of us who cut our teeth mucking about with bat files so we could play our DOS games and ended up learning useful skills out of necessity never happened in Japan.
I remember going there in 2001 and imode websites were already in heavy use with the people I met, whereas at home they were trying to push WAP but it was too expensive to get traction.
The key really was that brief time period where hardware had finally become widely available but software was still catching up with the new mass market.