With a population of over 127 million and a thriving global business community, how does an open-sourced platform like the Joomla CMS gain market share and brand awareness in a country that prides itself on superior engineering and beauty in unique design?  The answer is simple: One designer or developer at a time becoming part of a community.

For small to medium firms in Japan it is a constant struggle to publish well-targeted information in the digital landscape.  The CEO's or business owners of these firms prefer a hands-on approach at distributing their wealth of knowledge about their business. 

The largest obstacles for them to overcome is typically the lack of the necessary skill set to build a decent web site and maintain its content and security.  It is evident that these entrepreneurs are looking for a solution.  This is where Content Management Systems come in to play.  The question is, how does Joomla capture the attention of these business owners and managers?

Joomla is  not well known in Japan, but Xoops , Word Press and Movable Type are. The word, "CMS" itself, is still a new concept to the Japanese audience; the Japanese CMS market is still in an infancy stage. Some early adopters are testing new open-source platforms like Joomla and Drupal, but their activities are unnoticed in the larger business community.

Web agencies and designers in Japan are comfortable with current design and development tools like Dreamweaver and Movable Type for creating and deploying beautiful and unique, but primarily static sites.  They are unfamiliar with PHP programming and data-driven systems. For many, a CMS is only used for portal or community sites that require memberships. They do not know dynamic platforms can be a far better tool for web site development and that they can still maintain the unique creative style that has helped to grow many industries in Japan.  Joomla is the well-suited open solution for business sites in Japan and for the designers and developers who produce them.

According to the Joomla! Japan users forum (http://forum.joomla.jp/), the current number of registered members is 6,857 as of 5 May 2010. This number is growing daily and forum activity is increasing at a greater rate than last year.  There are several active supporters this year and the number is growing.  So how do we increase the number of designers and developers that are not only interested in Joomla! but also actively design and develop great sites?  The answer is simple:  One designer or developer at a time becoming part of the community.

By regularly being active in the Joomla community through the Forums, Site Showcase, Resource Directory and the upcoming People/Social Networking site along with other areas of the project it gives these designers and developers the opportunity to be part of a great international community that all have a common goal - to better the project!

So what is the hold up?  You may be wondering why Joomla is not as wide spread in Japan compared to Europe, North & South America, and other countries.  There are three main reasons...

1) Language Barrier

Almost all the information on Joomla is written in English. There are only a few Japanese Joomla educational sites and they do not cover all aspects of Joomla site development. They can be very helpful to the extent that users have some knowledge and experience on servers, MySQL, PHP, and HTML.

There are few web designers and web agencies in Japan who know English well enough to learn Joomla by themselves. The Japanese market does not require that web designers and developers know English, so it is difficult to navigate the community and documentation.

2) Few dedicated Joomla web site developers

As far as I know, there are a few dedicated Joomla web site developers in Japan. When it comes to Joomla template customization, it is very difficult to locate a professional.  Seminars and training on Joomla are non-existent. If there were more active Japanese Joomla web site developers, the Joomla market share and its brand awareness would be much larger.  The understanding, training, involvement and interest of the designer and developer community in Japan is the key to Joomla's success here.  The ones that are experts in designing and developing with Joomla are not voicing out their existence. They focus on their business activities and consider Joomla to simply be a useful tool. There are few Joomla user's group and they are inactive.

3) The words "open source CMS" and its merits are not known in the main stream market.

Similar to the word "Blog" five years ago in Japan, few people in the business community understand what a Content Management System is.  Although they are experiencing how easy it is to publish content in Blog system, they are beginning to feel that a simple Blog is not for a corporate web site and its functions are limited.  Until the designers and developers become comfortable with a CMS and are actively engaged in an open-source community, acceptance of Joomla! as a viable solution will not be seen in the business community.

For reference, there are only three Japanese books about Joomla! published and available. All three books are for the Joomla 1.5 version.

Notewothy Joomla web sites in Japan:

1. Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University

2. Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University

3.  AVG Japan

4. Career Design Institute Japan

5. YOTEC  Produced by  Yokohama Rehabilitation Foundation

6. City of Kofu, Yamanashi-prefecture

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