s/Neutralized/Naturalized/

I must say the story itself and comments are pretty hilarious.

First of all, Masayoshi Son is not even Japanese. He's Korean who was neutralized recently, with a very strong Korean background and ties to his home country.

And Apple was really stupid to give Softbank an exclusivity for so many years. Softbank remains the smallest of the 3 major carriers in Japan with 26% market share even after years of iPhone exclusivity. With their shoddy reputation, almost fraudulent sales tactics, crappy reception and coverage, unreliable and overloaded network capacity, they just could not steal any meaningful number of subscribers from NTT DoCoMo (45% market share) and KDDI au (29%) even after MNP became available. As the recent increase in iPhone sales proves, it's obvious that many people waited for KDDI and NTT to start offering iPhones.

I mean, we weren't missing any features that iPhone offered, so people didn't have much incentive to switch in a hurry. Even now, flip phones and Android phones made by Japanese manufacturers offer many crucial features (to Japanese consumers at least) such as waterproof body, TV tuner, NFC(FeliCa), etc. All of these had pretty much been standard features in Japan even before iPhone came out.

In fact, it's hard to find phones that do not have these features except for iPhone. To a typical Japanese, his/her cell phone has been their train pass, wallet, TV set, main email client (not just SMS/MMS, but a full html email, with huge library of emoticons and templates), internet browsers (a full-screen opera-browser as well as an iMode/WAP browser on the same device), high-res camera (with flash of course), music store + player, and 3D game console (with hugely successful app stores), all on pretty fast 3G networks, for about a decade.

I've been a mac user for more than 20 years and I use iPhone myself (on DoCoMo, no less), but Apple still have a long way to go before they can win over a majority of Japanese users.

I believe their egos would be disproportionally heavier than their actual body weight.