The thing with the asian market is that the surfers are not newbies in the same sense we have here. We were brought up on dial up and shit connections and scam artists.
Japanese online community is for the most part extremely honest, customer service is a national pasttime and it carries into the online world and their surfers were brought up on 8mbps DSL and an inclination to use new technologies.
And the HGMO figures are wrong :P
16,000 members at a minimum now. Retention that would give most webmasters a hard on - like 75%...
How to hit the asian markets tho, I am not sure - hire japanese university students to help translate your sites? I dunno. I DO know that most Japanese can read a decent amount of english actually. They just can't speak it
