There are less French layouts that I know of than English layouts (even than just of US layouts) - the French have been historically much more sucessful at linguistic domination/control of the language than the English have

I think that his sales figures are far too high - and perhaps are driven by the ludicrous cost. All you need to do is look at the Kodansha thing last week to see that a lot of stuff isn't on sale digitally, and won't be, because they're offering stupidly low rates. I don't know about novels, but original keitai comics are entirely done by amateurs - if there's one thing that Japan is not lacking in, it's wannabe mangaka - because the small ventures that are publishing them are basically expecting free work (rates of 1 to 10 yen per page) - if you're counting that, then the web-comic industry is part of the western publishing industry too (I expect it's not currently counted as being such.) The stuff that's available on phones is from a tiny pool of stories - Softbank have something like 200 different comic publishers on their comics menu, but they are all selling from the same pool of 100 or so titles from only one or two publishers, and they all want 1.5x to 2x the price that buying a tankobon would cost, even for comics that are pushing 30 years old.

I said know not "can read" - and please try not to come across as some sort of smug "I actually USE Japanese, I'm not some neckbeard type" because I do too. I don't read Japanese newspapers because the quality of the reporting is some of the worst in the world, but I've forgotten more about the Japanese comic book industry - from an insider pov, not reader pov - than you have ever known. In fact, in terms of comic books, look at teen comic books published in the 80s, and recently, and you'll see that a lot of them now use rubi for all kanji terms, when that was really a young-kids thing 15 or 20 years ago, there's a literacy based reason for that... Kani I've never seen on labels - including in supermarkets, we shall have to agree to disagree (is this a Yokohama vs Shizuoka thing?)

Well, the French keyboard is probably used in more different countries than the US keyboard then - does that satisfy you?

Quotes of "full literacy" for Japanese/Chinese are pure unadulterated bullshit - if you're willing to drop your standards so hard that China and Japan hit 90% literacy then you may as well claim that the UK, US, Australia, and other English-speaking nations have 100% - or better than 100% - literacy. I can tell you right now that none of the people I work with - highly trained engineers - are actually literate to the levels that the Japanese government expects of 16 year olds.

You forget to add that languages change their sort order / consideration of ligatures being letters from time to time. German and Swiss German have both - iirc - promoted/demoted letters and changed sorting within the past 10 or 15 years

Considered by the unicode consortium - who seemed to spend more time discussing whether or not to add a Klingon language plane than discussing Chinese-Korean-Japanese. They're as connected as Roman-Cyrillic-Russian characters are, and the ignorance of the unicode consortium has led to millions of localisation bugs, and a far reduced use of unicode in China, Japan, and Korea than in the west. Oh and there are a bunch of characters that are only one-way mappable JIS/SJIS/EUC to Unicode due to botched mapping tables (at the very least for perl and java's unicode)

If you mean the "English" keyboard, you have the US keyboard, UK keyboard, Irish keyboard, US (Apple) keyboard, UK (Apple) keyboard, Microsoft Extended UK keyboard, Microsoft Extended US keyboard etc etc etc...

Yes, and they dropped it, FAST, because everyone in markets that got localised VBA hated it

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

He only ever mentioned standing on the shoulders of giants because Sir Robert Hook, his great rival, was - famously - a midget.