Living in Japan, it's not that surprising. Until a few years ago Yahoo had far superior services in Japan for things such as transit directions. I remember 5 years ago trying to get around Tokyo using Google Maps with no success, but the Yahoo counterpart worked perfectly despite being harder for me to use since the UI was in Japanese only. These days, Google has equal or better services (although Yahoo still has some services Google does not provide such as an auction house). But inertia keeps people on Yahoo and Yahoo Japan is still very good, also they have close deals with Softbank (mobile phone carrier) which helps them keeping people on their sites.