In my own opinion, there's not much "direct" Japanese content in "western" systems like BitTorrent - my girlfriend's Japanese and constantly asks me for recordings of Japanese day-time TV, which you can't easily get on BitTorrent (there's exactly one tracker for Japanese TV-shows, lots for Anime, I think one tracker offers lesser-known Japanese movies, and that one has a ratio-system). Big western trackers like PirateBay rarely store these TV-shows.

I'm pretty sure that these "Japanese" systems are so successful not because of their technical features, but because they offer Japanese content.

So the solution to easily-used systems like BitTorrent which lack Japanese content... is to not start uploading content there, but to invent entirely new networks without any kind of content whatsoever and start uploading there?

Your explanation makes no sense.

I don't think BitTorrent ever got popular in Japan - this survey [1] says that only 6% of file-sharing users used BitTorrent in 2006. I think these entirely new systems were natural developments out of other, older systems from which everyone then moved, like WinMX and Limewire.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/number-file-share...

> I think these entirely new systems were natural developments out of other, older systems from which everyone then moved, like WinMX and Limewire.

But then why didn't they move to BitTorrent or Freenet? Those are equally natural moves, and superior in some respects. (Look at the system requirements for Perfect Dark, and reflect that that doesn't even buy you security if the firm's claims are true.)

It's the combined effects of

- their unawareness of BitTorrent (the Galapagos effect)

- the unwillingness to/difficulty of using English-language torrent sites

- a lack of Japanese champions of BT

BT simply never took off there, and Freenet hasn't taken off anywhere from what I know. I recall coming across a single BT site that was being used by a small but significant number of Japanese, which was surprising, but everything we heard indicated that WinNY and Share dominated there. Similarly, BT isn't a major player in Korea (which has its own networks), but dominates in China. The Internet is a series of interconnected but independently evolving regions.

Also, people will keep using a risky network if the chance of arrest is low and the benefits substantial enough. Humans are lazy, after all.

I think one thing to consider might be a language-gap - not many Japanese speak English, and read English pretty slow, to the point that Japanese Internet is sometimes its own island. BitTorrent started in the English-speaking world and had Japanese support a while later (edit: and there are still few torrenting sites in Japanese), maybe too late and the other new clients had already moved in?

Japan, welcome to http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/