Twitter to Japan

I saw this earlier in the Japanese press but Asiajin covers the fact that Digital Garage has invested in Twitter and will be bringing a Japanese interface to Twitter in the Spring. One of the market differences Twitter faces in Japan is that Japan does not use SMS on mobile phones. There is no SMS in Japan. Email is used. However, mobile phone email is a complex mess where each carrier has different settings on encoding of both the subject and body text. If Twitter is to succeed in Japan, it has to be successful on the phone. Whether it will break out into the mainstream of Japanese users is really dependent on whether young kids, young girls actually, get into it. I could see that happening virally.