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And how many jouyou kanji does the average person actually know - maybe 500? They can probably only read just north of 1000, too, and this only gets worse as you look at younger people. However, "ichigo" is on the jinmeiy (personal name) kanji list, so people should know it, and "kani" pretty much never gets used - it's rarer than "bara" (rose) in my experience, and almost as rare as "arigatou", which I have only ever seen used by native Chinese speakers.
For newspapers, it's just that they have the pushiest subscription-sellers in the world - as for books, I suspect that you'll find that a lot of those book sales are actually "just" comics - and the book/magazine/paper sales have been in freefall for a good 10 years, with Japanese publishers taking a ludicrously luddite stance to the idea of digital sales (and when they do float the idea of digital sales, the royalty rates they offer are insulting, a tiny fraction of that for analogue media even though their costs are so much lower)
Well, I'm 31 and my family who are even 3 years younger than me have a totally different mindset - further away from mine than my aunt who is 13 years older (This is especially true for the relatives who were born from the late 80s on.) The plural of anecdote is not "data" after all.
What on earth would make you think that? The pronounciation and spelling are far far away from the Japanese term, and the European powers - especially the British - certainly have a history in China. Honcho is very much a post WW2 term, probably picked up by the occupying army (much like "Skosh" for a small amount, from sukoshi), whereas Kowtow has been in the language for a few hundred years - before the opening of Japan 150 years ago. Finally, Tenko was a British drama, not an Australian soap.
It's worse than that - the ARM project was 9 years old when Acorn got involved - "we were involved in the floatation of a spin-off of one of the UK's most respected computer companies" isn't so impressive though, I guess
It's weird you single out the PS1 when it and the PS2 were famous for having drives that just stopped working - they lost at least one major class-action suit that I know of. Sony are like Bose - they've not had the quality they gained their reputation for since the 70s, but they've kept the high prices.
I've seen at least one new consumer 3d still camera on sale in Japan - from Fujifilm IIRC, and the new 3DS will also work as a 3d camera. Both have 3D screens as well, of course, so you can actually see your 3d picture in 3d.
You ARE John Major, and I claim my five pounds! Seriously though, Japan hadn't even minded it's own business for "hundreds" of years let alone "thousands" when the Black Ships arrived (it wasn't even a totally closed society - and would have ended up open without the Black Ships, eventually, as the ruling class were aware of how far behind they were being left)
The PSP has region locking for movies (at the very least) and the DSi has it for on-line content - there's no clear winner here.
As far as the PS3, the issue is that Sony have been consistently removing features since launch - not just as hardware revisions, but removing features through mandatory (if you want to go online / play recent games) firmware upgrades - and THAT is something that neither MS nor Nintendo have done.
It was said - by one of the villains - in the context of describing the perfect government (along with providing "a chicken for every pot") - it's MEANT to be a good thing even though the character talking isn't.
