I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a less populous country (European countries) you wouldn't have the local base to support the publishing of local language journals and technical books. So they're victims of their own success.

Sure they can go read an IEEE article, but 9/10 times they'll go to a Japanese source b/c it's so much easier for them.

For programming it's probably only worse. I imagine there is a Japanese equivalent to Stack Exchange, but it will have a tiny fraction of the help you get on the English language one. It's probably like programming in the 90s! =)