I honestly thought the PS3 would be selling at a decent 25-30k a week in Japan at this point, but it really has failed and it's back to 10-15k a week and it's possible that it could fall bellow 10k a week again this year....let's analyze why the PS3 has failed in Japan so far.
1) The Wii factor
This one might not be obvious to everyone, but the Japanese tend to be a one system per generation type of person. The PSP is the first time that two competing hardware systems find success in Japan, the PSP and DS will mark the first time two competing systems sell more than 10 million in Japan on the same generation. This problem is out of Sony's hands, nothing they can do about it, they can only hope to do to the PS3 what they did to the PSP and make it competitive and succesful in a one console per generation country.
2) Price
This is obvious, the PS3 is still too expensive, on amazon.jp it's going for 37,581Y which doing a quick conversion on yahoo comes out to $366 US dollars, that is still too expensive. This problem should be remedied this year, as there will probably be a price drop.
3) Redesign
Japan is a very small country with a very high population, people there generally favor small pieces of hardware around their apartment, a bulky, 7lb product won't do the trick, a slightly bigger sized Wii sized PS3 would be much more welcome. This problem should be remedied by the end of 09 at the very latest, IBM just started producing 45nm Cell and Toshiba has started producing 65nm RSX chips, once Toshiba is able to move on to 45nm chips, Sony should be able to have a PSThree redesign.
4) Games
Most important reason why the PS3 has failed so far in Japan, there are only a handful of games (HSG5, Dynasty Warriors 6, DMC4, Yakuza 2, GT5P, Sisgaea 3) that really appeal the Japanese and none of them are really system sellers, if we had a lot of Japanese like content and only certain western centric games like DMC4, GT5P, R6V, Oblivion, Ratchet, Burnout, and Need for Speed. how well do you think the PS3 would be selling in Europe/America? Not well at all I reckon.
This is the worst problem the PS3 is facing now in Japan and with an upcoming Japanese schedule looking like this:
The situation is not looking bright for Sony in the near future IMHO.
