Japanese Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

GungHo reports Puzzle and Dragons is earning $3.75 million a day

by Mike Schramm (May 13th, 2013)

GungHo Entertainment is a game publisher based in Japan, and the company has just released some really wild financial numbers. According to the latest numbers, GungHo made US$118 million this past April alone, most of it from one game: Puzzle and Dragons, currently available on iOS. Puzzle and ...

Square Enix announces Final Fantasy Tactics S, coming soon to iOS

by Mike Schramm (Apr 26th, 2013)

Square Enix has launched a Japanese site for an upcoming mobile game called Final Fantasy Tactics S, and it sounds intriguing. Final Fantasy Tactics, of course, is the excellent tactical strategy game based on Square's old Final Fantasy series, which arrived on iOS a little while ago. The "S" ...

Tengami is a beautiful journey through heavenly paper

by Mike Schramm (Mar 28th, 2013)

Jennifer Schneidereit is one of three developers who worked with legendary game developers Rare on Kinect Sports. That same group of three later created their own company, Nyamyam games. They started work on their first title, Tengami, about two years ago. Since then, it has been honored with ...

Tamagotchi coming back as an iOS app

by Mike Schramm (Feb 8th, 2013)

Truth be told, I was just a little too old to land in the middle of the Tamagotchi craze: My childhood was more full of Trapper Keepers and Game Boys than the famous Japanese virtual pets. But of course I saw them all over the place back in the '90s, as did everyone, really. And now the ...

Apple's iBookstore to hit Japan this year

by Michael Grothaus (Jan 2nd, 2013)

Before Apple rolled out the iBookstore in Japan in 2010, it failed to negotiate the necessary contracts with Japan's biggest book publishers. As a result, the iBookstore in Japan was stocked predominately with free, public domain e-books. The only paid e-books in the store have been from very ...

Square Enix considers dropping iOS prices

by Mike Schramm (Oct 26th, 2012)

The Casual Connect gaming conference is going on in Kiev, Ukraine this week, and while there, Square Enix's General Manager of Mobile for Europe Antony Douglas expressed that his company is considering lowering its prices on iOS. By itself, that's not a very surprising notion: Most companies ...

Japanese robot pet powered by iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Mar 26th, 2012)

Robotic pets are kind of kid stuff here in the US, but they're a big deal over in Japan, and here's one that takes advantage of the iPhone's popularity. The Smartpet is a robotic dog that "borrows" the iPhone as head unit. The body is mechanical, of course, but the head uses the iPhone's ...

Siri's Japanese performance not as good as DoCoMo's voice assistant

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 13th, 2012)

Apple added support for Japanese in iOS 5.1, but the roll out isn't going as smoothly as expected. According to a Kotaku report, Apple's voice assistant can apparently only handle simple and universal Japanese phrases. When it comes to complex phrases, Siri stumbles while its competitor Shabette ...

Apple reportedly readying iTunes Match for Japan

by Mike Schramm (Feb 22nd, 2012)

Japanese Mac site Macotakara notes that the Japanese version of iTunes has been updated with a "Purchased" tab via iTunes in the Cloud, which also suggests that Apple is about to launch an official version of iTunes Match in Japan. iCloud has been up and running in Japan for some time, but only ...

Siri's upcoming Japanese language abilities leaked - by Siri

by Chris Rawson (Feb 14th, 2012)

We learned not too long ago that Siri is on schedule to speak a few more languages soon, specifically Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Japanese. Siri herself (itself?) has confirmed that at minimum Japanese support is coming soon, according to 9to5 Mac. I personally verified that asking Siri "What ...

Siri may speak and understand Chinese, Japanese, and Russian by March

by Chris Rawson (Feb 8th, 2012)

According to Chinese tech site DoNews (sketchy English translation here), Apple plans on bringing support for Mandarin Chinese to Siri as early as March of this year. Other dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese, will remain unsupported for the time being. Support for Japanese and Russian is ...

OpenFeint hires new CEO, Jason Citron leaves

by Mike Schramm (Sep 15th, 2011)

It's the end of an era for one of iOS' biggest ventures -- OpenFeint has hired a new CEO, Naoki Aoyagi, which means company founder Jason Citron is leaving the company to head elsewhere. OpenFeint, you'll remember, has its roots in an iPhone game called Aurora Feint, which Citron developed a ...

Nintendo's Pokemon getting an iOS app

by Mike Schramm (Jul 6th, 2011)

Nintendo has been careful not to support Apple at all with its iOS initiative -- though mobile devices are huge in Japan (and a lot of Japanese companies have found success even on the North American App Store), the general feeling out of the video gaming giant seems to be that Apple's iPhone and ...

iPhone Geiger Counter would benefit Japan, needs Kickstarter love

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 15th, 2011)

The folks at RDTN have organized a Kickstarter project to fund the development and deployment of radiation detectors in Japan. The project uses an iPhone hacked to work with a variety of radiation detectors. The radiation units (shown here) will be sent into the field and used to collect data on ...

Japanese publishers censure Apple over App Store violations

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 14th, 2010)

A group of Japanese publishers are censuring Apple after copyrighted material was reportedly scanned and distributed through the iOS App Store. The group points to numerous App Store applications that are illegally re-publishing the works of well-known Japanese authors, including Haruki Murakami and ...