Eurogamer

Microsoft has finally managed to shift 1.5 million Xbox 360 units in Japan. It launched there in December 2005.

Japanese site Wazap (translated by Kotaku) noted the milestone, although the latest hardware chart shows Microsoft's console still lingering, as usual, in last place.

Worldwide, Xbox 360 sales are currently pegged at a far healthier 55 million total. That's five million more than the PlayStation 3, although still behind the Wii's 86.01 million.

Xbox 360 hit the million mark in Japan in March 2009, after three years and three months on shop shelves. The extra 500,000 sales have taken another two years and three months to notch up.

Will Xbox 360 ever be able to endear itself to Japan? Microsoft hopes so - it used last year's Tokyo Games Show to announce several Kinect-exclusive partnerships with icons of Japanese game development.

Grasshopper's Suda51 revealed codename D, a new Masaya Matsuura game named Haunt was shown, while Capcom announced it was dusting off mech sim Steel Battalion for a Kinect sequel.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-17-xbox-360-sells-1-5-million-in-japan

Wii's also sold about 3x what GameCube did in Japan.  PS3's sold about a third what PS2 did... kinda funny.

100% agree on both points.

I've been looking forward to a post like this, celebrating such an unlikely milestone, against all odds. And now...

Jump In.

MS should just give up, you are going up against 2 Japanese companies that both have strong ties and relationships with Japanese publishers and on top of getting less support you are in an culture that has strong xenophobia.

But only like 5 million or so PS3 have been sold.

If you look at it that way I think it does quite well in Japan. 1.5 million is quite a lot.

in about 3 years the target of 2 millions gonna be reality!!!!! Yeah !!! Gongratulations Microsoft!!!

Well still horrible though.  The xbox was just an American system that had a very few Japanese games DOA 3, Ninja Gaiden,  Dino Crisis 3 and a SMT game that was a online game and who's servers went down almost immediately...

While the X360 had the first HD jrpg (enchanted Arms) then project sylpheed, time exclusive eternal sonata, Blue Dragon, Time Exclusive Tales of vesperia, Lost Odissey, The last Renmant, FFXI online, Time Exclusive Star Ocean 4, Infinite undiscovery, Magna Carta 2 (ok that is an KRPG still), Dead Rising, and a lot of other titles...

Result:  in the same time frame it managed to sell barely more than 2 times the original xbox (X360 is longer on the market now) while the effort from MS was 20 times better... It was even in the first three years of his existence the JRPG console...

considering all the efforts by the side of microsoft to promote it in japan i don 't know if it is celebration time
it is also funny to say look xbox perfom better than xbox and gamecube because when you look the sales of those two you can only epect to surpass them i mean wtf CAN 'T 360 sell more than 400,000 units XD

To be fair, FFXI online was released on PS2 and PC several years before it was on 360 and japanese don't care about games like Dead Rising. And in Japan there are only 3 big JRPG franchises and rest are tiny compared to them. For example, SO and Tales series were never huge series in Japan, not even on PS2. None of  SO and Tales games have ever got past 1 million copies in Japan (on PS2 they only sold aroundin 0.5 million) while FF and DQ and Pokemon sell more than 4 million copies almost every time. So, MS only secured mid-sized franchises and some new IP's which are only rarely hits. Just securing FF (which was not released in Japan) or DQ would have had more effect on sales than all games you listed combined.