[HajiShirazu]

This guy is absolutely right. Everything he says is totally true and there definitely is a huge market for online poker in Japan. I stayed there a year at a college and was friends with two or three total degenerate pachinko gamblers and my girlfriend's friends were telling me about many more. And pachinko is like the most boring form of gambling ever. Making up total garbage statistics, I would estimate the Japanese spend at least 3 times more than Americans on average on gambling and make about 80% of the money. Furthermore they are just the type that poker would draw in due to the allure of it being beatable, but most would suck at it because they don't understand gambling - "keiba yosou" (horse racing prediction) and "pachislot kouryaku" (pachislot - a slot machine where you supposedly control the reel stopping but is actually totally random - strategy) magazines are absolutely huge sellers and 100% of them are total garbage. It is the biggest joke in the world, a pachinko parlor. You come in and there is no way to choose your stakes, and it probably costs on average $50-100 an hour to play at the pace these people play at, just dumping huge buckets of balls in. I don't know what the house edge is despite reading pachinko strategy mags myself as they would never tell you, but it is easily in the double digits or more. It is not even legal to gamble for real money either - you are supposed to only be able to exchange for prizes but every parlor has its own window where you can make the trade for cash. The places are terribly smoky and there are no comps/free drinks like we have in America - although the ball bucket girls are pretty hot - but people seriously cannot get enough of it.
Unfortunately the government in Japan would never let a poker boom go down legally. Japan is a liberal country socially (most people are some form of agnostic which is why the country owns btw, religion = bad quality of life) and would otherwise turn a blind eye to online gaming in most cases, but the problem is that the gaming industry is heavily controlled by right wing yakuza influences. If online gaming started to take a chunk out of their pachinko and horse profits they would immediately strongarm the government and take it down. Furthermore they hold a great deal of control over the media, even more than the FCC, so there will probably never be any kind of decent promotion for online sites there on tv/magazines. I think that if someone started showing poker on a major cable network and emphasized the strategy and the amounts of money they were playing with, it would take off huge - but it's not going to happen.