Kotaku

While the peripheral's launch wasn't exactly spectacular, the Japan arm is once again rolling out its Kinect trailer at locations across Japan.

The trailer offers folks a chance to check out Kinect — a chance they had at Japanese retail. Those demo stations were apparently unloved and lonely.

But the Kinect trailer is far more fetching! There are girls with question marks on their butts, and the trailer even has a ceiling fan. Hopefully that will alleviate any fears of how one will use Kinect in a tiny Japanese apartment.

The Kinect trailer tour kicks off on March 19 in Hiroshima and ends up in Kobe in April.

http://kotaku.com/#!5780906/xbox-japan-isnt-giving-up-on-kinect-there-is-a-trailer

If I am honest, I don't even know why they bother, those resources would be better allocated somewhere to Europe. ~4k HW a week just can't be justified when US churns out about 30x times as many units per week.

Exactly. Wasted resources took the words out of my mouth. Ninty and Sony own Japan that no amount of marketing in Japan will ever change that. 

its clearly for the future. Japan is clearly helping ps3 surpass the 360. It is a market that imo once you have it unlike EMEAA it will be harder to stop having if you know what I mean

No matter how hard MS will try, 360 will never lift off dramatically in Japan. PS3 suits their needs, it's a japanese game company and majority of the japanese developers who by the way produce games that are geared towards Japanese choose PS3 as their platform of choice. 360 tried that with a few JRPGS earlier on in the cycle, and tbh the sales weren't that impressive. Just stands no chance whatsoever in that region. Although the sales are an improvement over Xbox but when your competition outsells you by 6x,7x you know that resistance is futile. Chances are if they stop shipping X360s there more Japanese will import them themselves.

I disagree, Ms has shown they can provide popular exclusive, what I think has killed them mainly this gen is the fact that their biggest games have gone multiplat in japan mostly

Exactly. Shafted by japanese game developers, and now majority of JRPGs that do come out are PS3 exclusive, no point buying another console that virtually has no games.

Microsoft needs to spend their resources on more hardcore 1st/2nd party games.

i find it very  admirable that Microsoft is not giving up...i really respect that...okay they are sort of dead in Japan but they easily surpassed Xbox sales and will maybe even triple that!

I do have to admire their tenacity here.  It seems like an obvious choice to just let it go and funnel the money elsewhere, but I've got to admit that as US centric as 360 sales are they stick it out even in the worst of territories plugging away.