The Military-

I am in the United States Marine Corp Res. ( I am a senior Finance Major at a University)

I know for a fact that about 50,000 Marines are based in Okinawa Japan at any given time, there are also severval major Naval Bases in Mainland Japan and a couple of Medium sized bases there. I would estimate that there are around 110,000 US military personel in Japan at any given time.

Another thing about military guys is that they get there paycheck and since their housing and food and utilities are covered they have fun with almost their entire pay. It is not uncommon for people to get a paycheck go to the PX and spend half of it. So basically Marines buy alot of luxury items, especially videogames.

The X360 is by far the most popular console in the military(FPS Games, Duh...) followed by PS3, then Wii ( I have to deal with people joking about me playing with my Wii all the time )

All of this to point out that as bad as 360 sales are in the land of the rising son, the US military could very well be account for as much as 20-30% of total sales.

One thing to remember is that Military duty station deploymenta(at least in the USMC) last  2 year, always. And also Marines would be more likely to buy those types of items when they are lonely on the other side of the globe. Also a smart person would buy any thing of great value overseas if they went, There are no taxes to be paid when deployed outside of US soil (That is one of the reason you can make so much money if you go to Iraq, of course in addition to seperation and danger pay)- Last summer I went for AT for 2 weeks in Japan and many people in my unit made their purchases of expensive electronics while we were there for that reason.  

Anyways,  imput would be enjoyed

I don't think the military would be covered in Japanese sales. Since they are American systems being sold instead of Japanese ones, they would count for sales in the US.

Stores don't track the nationality of the people who buy them. If I (a Canadian) go to Japan today and buy an Xbox 360, that counts as a Japanese sale. Now, since I'm sure the military doesn't have a program for marines to order American Xbox 360s for themselves and get them shipped, any 360s they bought in Japan would count as Japanese sales.

Very interesting.

They don't ship the stuff in the PX from the US, it is mostly direct- They would be covered, it was a sale made on Japanese soil. Now the question is whether they are shipped the domestic version or one from back home, either way sale made in other countries count for other countries, now if we went back to the of GNP(Gross National Product) then it would most definitly count for a sale in the US>

That is actually interesting. If the 360 is region locked it would be questionable as to whether troops would buy a Japanese 360.

 Well, the factories are in places like China, so it would be shipped direct. But they wouldn't be selling a bunch of American soldiers Japanese region locked Xbox 360s at the PX.

Even if all them bought a 360 its still not gonna impact very much on the overall picture in Japan.

It will if 30,000 of them do, since there's a 510,000 userbase in Japan. That's over 5%

wow that was interesting. never though about that.

Another reason military 360 sales wouldn't counted in Japan. Data by Famitsu and M-Create are compiled by retail information. I highly doubt the PX is part of their retail data.