Was hoping this would be about Unicode and Han unification.
Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that.
The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.
Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that.
The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.