We get signups from mainland China. From Saudi Arabia. From Ghana. Even attempted signups from Iran.
But it's very, very rare someone from Japan signs up.
Why is this ?
For Japan, I'm pretty confident it's the language barrier. As in most countries, tech people in Japan are mostly males, and mostly are not very strong in the humanities and in social skills. This group tends to be extremely self-conscious about their limited English ability and generally avoids interaction with foreigners.
For Korea, I see a trend, but I'm not confident about the explanation. I see lots of bright kids at university, see them get hired at big tech firms, and see them enthuse about their work over beers. I don't see them interacting a lot with foreigners. My impression is there is so much going on within Korea that they don't feel strongly motivated to look outside.
There are reasons I come up with: Little known in Japanese community; there are many people don't watch English community even if they are fine to read English docs and send PR. There are almost zero article introduces rsync.net. Yen is weak for Dollar at this time. Overseas storage service tend to be slow from Japan. It's harder to be adopted by enterprises without Japanese reseller.
In my experience, rsync+ssh with higher latency is slow and price isn't attracting, so I haven't tried it yet.
BTW, Backblaze is great about PR thanks to HDD stats. News websites frequently advertise their name for free. They also have local reseller.
Relatively famous software reseller (repackager) but focused on individuals
Wonder if it’s seeing much adoption, this company looks to be kind of like Carbonite for Japan
That "accent" is due to our standard English teaching method that builds up an on-the-fly bidirectional translation layer on top of pure Japanese internal monologue. We're trained all the way from middle schools to college/University to do this complex rule-based word transposition and word-for-word substitution technique and that is unnatural as anything and slow as, like real QEMU. This is also why many dumb-faced Japanese people with some English skills are rather quick to issue and respond to fewer-words commands with highly technical expressions("don't lubricate [that] receptacle") but are far slower at returning verbal responses with higher word counts("I'm already 5 minutes into the future from the point I was to be there"), because they're doing it and it's not just a complex multi-parallel but also kind of an exponential time process.
I'm done with that method for better or worse, and I suspect my "tone" in literal English should not even be convincingly Japanese. But it's still way harder to do English, and for the vast majority of us who aren't demonstrably English speaking, it's just their precise translation skills coming with massive overhead.
My experience is that English in Japan isn’t really spoken outside of big tech firms and even there the quality isn’t great.
I have tried organizing an event on the same topic in Japanese and in English, almost no one showed up in English but it was full in Japanese.
They have their own alternatives to some services and stack overflow, qiita.
The thing is that they don’t really need to speak English and for the cases they need English they bite a foreigner.
The problem is that even with that, the mindset still appears to preserve the notion of Japanese supremacy over everything irrespective of data to the contrary. So improvement isn’t happening.
Take the Shinkansen as anotherq example. Impressive if you look at the train specs and reliability/punctuality. What isn’t seen so readily is the manual process of booking seats at stations with limited options for booking online. That manual process is often so inefficient that you might as well travel by a slower train given the loss of time involved.
Similar inefficiencies are observable throughout Japan. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. True of the younger English speakers as well from what I’ve seen. Not entirely sure if that’s blind deference, fear of conflict/group judgement or the result of brainwashing into a collaboration over competition mindset. Maybe it’s a mix of all of the above.
So I see very narrow examples of personal excellences where that obsession and perseverance doesn’t involve getting others on board. But innovation or improvement involving groups is more dysfunctional than anything I’ve seen elsewhere by a wide margin.
The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things.
I mean, it's even the case offline. Have anyone seen or used the omnipresent NCR made ATM, with transparent green card slot? There are lots of Ingenico Lane/5000 lately, but that green plastic cover still isn't a thing here. I think there are very few regions that you could live without ever seeing one in life. We're isolate as that.
People who are tied to the English-speaking net are often totally unaware of how many areas are dominated by local companies even in markets that are linguistically much closer and more used to using English.
And that's not really a criticism - it's hard to keep up when you're not immersed in it.
I'm Norwegian but live in the UK, and I keep being surprised by Norwegian or Scandinavian online services I was unaware of when I go home to visit family, for example, despite following Norwegian news, and visiting twice a year. It's not that they're necessarily more advanced (though sometimes they are) or better, but just that often you find local companies better entrenched than you'd expect.
Compare with Singapore, Taiwan.