All aboard the roflcopter!

 Yeah, I heard apple has been suffering because of japanese nationalism, the ipod is only the most popular pmp on japan. Not to mention the japanese pay the most money for the sweden (german?) Leica cameras or the huge amount of french luxury brands earning thousands of millions out of the moonspeak island. 

Obviously there must be a lot other reasons, but I can see these two as quite strong:
concern for HW quality and fear and hatred for MS. The bad feelings against MS in markets it still doesn't dominate is quite deserved, just let's see the companies history: in the past Nintendo lost easily and suddenly its near monopoly, Sony too, but if we see MS, once they conquer a monopoly, they seem to grab it forever, they can do horrible products like MSDOS 4.0, Win ME, Vista, Word 6.x, elephantine versions of Office, even the now more than decent and loved Win XP before the first SP was a nightmare about security and stability, yet they don't lose their monopolies. This legitimately scares people and makes a lot of them avoid MS products whenever possible.

Reading this thread, it's pretty clear to me why people can't understand why the XB360 is not doing good in Japan.
I mean, it's pretty obvious. But the problem is that it doesn't go well with the alternate reality, the utopia of the people for whom the XB360 should be doing well in Japan no matter what. So as reality doesn't go well with their utopia, they make their own BS, and what's more amazing, they're eating it.
Nonsense like "360 is the king of rpg's this gen", or "Japan is even more nationalistic than the USA", or even better, 360 is a reliable console.

No wonder these people can't ever understand why the 360 isn't doing good in Japan. Getting back to Earth would help I guess. That is, if they want to get back, which probably isn't the case.

The problem with MS, is that they often destroy what they partner with. In this case, getting several JRPG companies in Japan to make games for their failure will surely destroy some of these companies. JRPG weren't doing well, and I don't even blame MS for the demise of JRPG game companies. That's the companies' fault for being stupid. Thus, I blame Mistwalker for their demise, that's their fault.

JRPG are going down even faster than before, only DS is a saving grace for the genre. So much that I have no chance of ever playing every JRPG I WANT to play on it. The DS showed that it's good enough to produce the JRPG of old. Now, a console JRPG has to be sth that can't me made on a DS to succeed. Just graphics is not enough.
Graphics never were the selling point of JRPG, I still wonder how people could be fooled in believing that. So graphics alone won't make a successful JRPG. The HD consoles being sold mainly on graphics, I'm not surprised JRPG fail on them. I'm part of the people that feel FFXIII will be a relative flop on PS3 BTW.

ookaze,

You're an angry little man.

But fact is, no matter what the Japanese gamers think about it:

X360 is the king of RPGs this gen.

@ookaze

I'm not a JRPG expert or fan, but from what I've seen so far I think that FF XIII could be a title that maybe risks letting tepid die-hard JRPG gamers, but could amply compensate attracting towards a JRPG gamers normally tepid towards the genre.
About too many people overemphasizing graphics, I totally agree, IMVHO graphics must be "good enough", they must not be so ugly to ruin an otherwise good game, but once they are good enough, I prefer that further efforts are put in other and more important aspects of the games.

Has anyone considered that there might be a sea change in Japan...at least in the mainstream gamer...away from JRPGs. They seem to be gobbling up more of the casual, quirky titles than the more time engrossing games of yesteryear.

 The Wii had no momentum either...

I think it has a LOT to do with it being microsoft.

While Wii and PS3 don't even have 1...

"In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is King."

I agree with what a lot of people here are saying, build quality.

Most countries outside the US take quality into effect. Even though it has the most games, and some of the better ones, if the thing is a piece of junk from a build quality perspective, it's not going to sell well in Japan.

It's a cultural thing.

See FF7-12.

Aside from that i assume it's because JRPGs are one genre where people mostly perfer the same kind of gameplay that's been around since the NES. Nice turn based, throw in a few tricks but nothing to fancy combat. Put it in a fantasy setting, and you have to save the world.

The only things that have drastically changed in them is the graphics.

People are trying to copy FF's success not realizing that it isn't it's graphics that do it.  It was just that FF was at the right place at the right time.