Apple fans denounce Wired article. Japanese still not buying many iPhones.
Does Japan hate the iPhone as much as Wired thinks it does? No, say local experts Nobi Hayashi and Daiji Hirata, who were somewhat misquoted by Brian Chen in his article. — Though the quotes were accurate …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after Wired asked why the Japanese hate the iPhone, two of the Japanese experts quoted in that piece — Nobi Hayashi and Daiji Hirata — are pushing back through Boing Boing Gadgets, saying Brian Chen's framing misrepresented their views even where the quotes themselves were accurate. The dispute lands in the middle of a long-running puzzle: from Business Week's 2007 question of whether Japan even needs the iPhone to a 2008 survey finding 91% of Japanese respondents wouldn't buy one, coverage has repeatedly framed Japan as the market where Apple's flagship underperforms — and this correction shows how contested that framing already is.
First-order effects
- The credibility of Wired's 'Japan hates the iPhone' thesis takes an immediate hit: its own sources say they were somewhat misquoted, giving Apple partisans and skeptical readers a concrete basis to dismiss the piece.
- Japanese consumer resistance to the iPhone remains the stubborn underlying fact regardless of the quote fight — Hayashi and Hirata's objection is to the framing ('hate'), not necessarily to evidence of weak Japanese uptake.
Second-order effects
- Apple benefits from the backlash narrative: if 'Japan hates the iPhone' reads as Western media overreach rather than local reality, Apple avoids having a structural weakness in a major market amplified into conventional wisdom.
- Other outlets covering the Japan-iPhone story now have to source more carefully; the episode raises the cost of recycling the same expert voices into sweeping cultural explanations for sales figures.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — thin local sales explained by broad cultural claims, then disputed by the very experts cited — it points toward a recurring tension in tech coverage between compelling national-character narratives and messier on-the-ground demand dynamics.
- Whether Japan eventually becomes an outlier Apple must design for or a lagging market that catches up (as later iPad enthusiasm would test) shapes how analysts model regional divergence inside otherwise global product launches.
The trend: This episode is one data point in the ongoing contest over whether Japan represents a genuine structural limit on the iPhone's global appeal or simply a market whose rejection gets overstated by narrative-hungry Western tech media.