I just noticed that Japanese consumers have purchased VERY few units for each of the consoles/handhelds this week when compared to the N.American and "Other" counter-parts. The only exception was the PSP, which sold less in the "Other" regions than it did in Japan, and not by much.

 Is this a trend that I was just previously unaware of, or is something happening in Japan that is making them wary of purchasing units?

holiday season hasn't started in Japan yet, that's why. We've finally seen sales boost a little this week for the start of the holidays. It will speed up pretty fast from here. Japan's holiday season will start and end a couple weeks later than america.

I think the whole market has shifted to casual and now people rarely play video games now. I think they are tired of these long engaging games that suck alot of time out of a person's life. And they are now moving onto portable gaming, so they can do gaming on the go. You see how the Nintendo DS is selling, its selling like hotcakes with syrup over there.

Japanese don't celebrate Christmas.

Or not so huge like we do in USA, EU + Others.

They have a lot less people in the country?

Sales don't usually pick up in Japan until december

Market %

Americas- 50%
Europe/other- 35%
Japan- 15%

That's why with some rounding to make it all nice and clean. Japan though is the second largest individual market out there, just edging out UK, and far behind the US.

^ um... Japan is far ahead of the UK, it has more than twice as many people.

japan isnt as far ahead of the uk as it use to be this week 328,000 consoles and handhelds were sold in the uk and the week before japan sold 246,000 console and handhelds.

 Christmas is not as important in Japan as in other regions ... also there are only ~ 120 million people living there , while in Europe nearly 0.5 billion , and in the USA more than 300 million ...