If there was any doubt that Japan is still a hot market for startups, this news should clear any doubts. Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Capital are joining forces to pump $20 million into helping early-stage mobile and social American companies expanding into Japan. This will certainly be good news for startups in the Valley who have been eyeing the Eight Islands.

Toshiaki Chiku, who is now heading the US operations via SoftBank’s office in New York, had this to say:

Yahoo Japan is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market. Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank, we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.

SoftBank Capital is the venture branch of one of Japan’s largest telcos, SoftBank Corporation (TYO:9984), and thus has strong interests in promoting products and services that will be used on top of its wires. Yahoo Japan is set to report its Q4 earnings today and mobile advertising has long been its largest division, contributing to 20 percent of its earnings. Yahoo Japan is also Japan’s leading search engine and reaches over 80 percent of Japan’s Internet users through its many services. Yahoo Japan also went in with GREE Ventures to invest $2 million into social gaming just a few months ago.

SoftBank has been quite aggressive in expanding US startups in Japan. Not only did it invest early in Yahoo Japan in 1995 but also recently announced another $250 million to create the PrinceVille Fund aimed at getting US startups competing in Asia. SoftBank’s already got some considerable success with exiting companies. It sold Bluefin Labs to Twitter, BuddyMedia to Salesforce, HuffingtonPost to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon, and OMGPOP to Zynga. It’s looking to do the same in Japan.

Given the above interests, it makes sense for the two companies to double down on mobile and encourage innovation. Japan’s mobile consumers are also quite willing to pay for mobile services as evidenced by it being the top mobile ad market until late last year.

Full Press Release below:

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN Announce Partnership and $20M Fund Investment to Help Bring More U.S. Startups to the Japanese Market

Japan’s leading Internet company to fund early-stage companies via SoftBank Capital and help startups drive business in Japan

New York, NY & Tokyo, Japan – April 24, 2013 – Yahoo Japan Corp. (“Yahoo!JAPAN”), Japan’s largest web portal and one of the largest e-commerce platforms, and SoftBank Capital, a venture group affiliated with Japan’s SoftBank Corp. (“SoftBank”), today announced an investment and partnership designed to help U.S. startups of all sizes in everything from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion.

SoftBank Capital’s early-stage Technology Fund ’10 has been investing $100 million on behalf of SoftBank, which has anchored SoftBank Capital’s investing activities since 1995. Yahoo! JAPAN, a joint venture between U.S. Internet company Yahoo! Inc. and SoftBank, has invested $20 million into the early stage fund. This complements the $250 million PrinceVille Investments, L.P. fund (“PrinceVille Fund”) announced in February.

In addition to its investment, Yahoo! JAPAN is announcing Toshiaki Chiku as its head of U.S. operations, where he will oversee investments and partnerships while working out of Softbank Capital’s Manhattan office.

“Yahoo! JAPAN is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market,” Chiku said. “Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.”

Yahoo! JAPAN’s influence in the Japanese market allows its partners to fully harness the market’s opportunities. Every month, Yahoo! JAPAN reaches more than 80percent* of Japan’s Internet users through its services. Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, recently began an expansion into Asia after completing a Series D round with investors including SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN.

“Our partnerships with SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN have been crucial in helping us establish our presence in Asia, with Yahoo! JAPAN enabling us to rapidly scale our business by tapping into one of the largest sources of premium inventory on Japan’s leading Internet portal,” Criteo CEO JB Rudelle said.

Yahoo! JAPAN’s partnership with SoftBank Capital is one of many developments further cementing Softbank Capital’s reputation as the premier investment partner for U.S. companies looking to expand into Asia. The fund has been investing on behalf of SoftBank, which has brought many U.S. companies to the Japanese market starting with Yahoo! JAPAN in 1995. The investment firm recently announced its $250 million PrinceVille Fund designed to help growth-stage entrepreneurs and their businesses compete in and expand into Asia.

Yahoo! JAPAN and SoftBank Capital are looking to invest in companies in the mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing spaces. SoftBank Capital’s previous exits include Bluefin Labs acquired by Twitter, Buddy Media acquired by Salesforce.com, Huffington Post acquired by AOL, Hyperpublic acquired by Groupon and OMGPOP acquired by Zynga.

“We like to say that our expertise and partnerships give our portfolio companies an ‘unfair advantage’ when it comes to growth opportunities in Asian markets,” said Ron Fisher, Managing Partner of SoftBank Capital. “Partners like Yahoo! JAPAN allow us to deliver on that message and become a preferred partner that can help our portfolio companies forge the relationships necessary to further expand their international presence.”

Source: Nielsen (NetView JP), brand level data, access from home and office using PCs（excluding Internet application, February 2013

Yahoo Japan and GREE (TYO:3632) announced today what they had teased a few months back – the launch of a joint-venture company that will focus on developing and running social gaming titles for smartphones. After comitting ¥200 million (US$2.2 million) to this new gaming venture, a cat was then brought into the office and allowed to walk across a keyboard ¹, creating the joint-venture’s tentative name, GxYz.

GREE will hold 51 percent of the stake in GxYz, with the rest owned by Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO). Today’s announcement says that it’ll open for business on March 15th with GREE’s Tomoyuki Isaka as the CEO. The focus will be on Japanese gamers and doesn’t cover GREE’s overseas operations.

GREE is already Japan’s top social gaming platform, up against rivals as diverse as DeNA’s Mobage, Apple’s Game Center, and increasingly strong messaging apps with gaming integration, such as Line and KakaoTalk. The tie-up with Yahoo has already given GREE’s mobile titles greater exposure on Yahoo Japan, which is the country’s preferred search engine.

Today’s announcement summarizes:

Through the establishment of GxYz, the two companies aim to strengthen their smartphone social gaming business partnership, combining the user acquisition capabilities of Yahoo Japan with the social gaming development and operational expertise of GREE, while developing exceptional social games that will open up new possibilities in the game development business.

The two tech giants are already co-sponsoring Japan’s push to secure the 2020 Olympics.

As for Yahoo, we know that Yahoo Japan wants to be more social and mobile, so GREE seems like a good fit for the web portal company.

The GxYz name is not yet written in stone and could be replaced if a better one comes along – perhaps by picking letters at random from a bag of Scrabble tiles.

(Source: GREE, via TheNextWeb)

We’ve seen the niche community called Tokyo Otaku Mode pass 10 million Facebook ‘likes’ and launch the awesome Manga Camera app, and now the fledgling social startup has another major milestone. This evening, Tokyo Otaku Mode announced that it has attracted funding, for an undisclosed sum, from three local VCs. The investment came from YJ Capital (an investment subsidiary of Yahoo Japan), DG Incubation, and ITOCHU Technology Ventures.

Focusing on the otaku community surrounding Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay, its venture started out as a Facebook page before also launching a standalone site and its first mobile app (pictured below). [UPDATE: We're told the app has had nearly 700,000 downloads so far; plus a brand-new app dedicated to users of the main site will be launched in April]. Tokyo Otaku Mode will use the funding to accelerate its growth and global presence, says today’s announcement.

The site features user-generated otaku content, and is perhaps the world’s biggest English-language destination for this kind of niche pop culture.

Explaining the attraction, YJ Capital’s Toshiki Oya said today:

The presence of Japan’s pop culture is being strengthened throughout the world. As a worldwide media distributor, Tokyo Otaku Mode spread rapidly. I am exceedingly glad to be able to take part through investing. I anticipate seeing even more growth from this company moving forward.

After enjoying Manga Camera so much, I hope that more apps will be a key part of its global expansion. Find it here for iPhone, and here for Android.

Crowdworks, a Tokyo-based startup providing a crowdsourcing platform that matches engineers and designers with job postings, announced today it has partnered with Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) to integrate its platform into a service called Yahoo Crowdsourcing.

Yahoo Crowdsourcing was unveiled as a beta service last year and seemed to gather a limited number of users for testing, but still only has been showing a teaser screen publicly. With this new integration, a part-time worker who takes on an interesting work project can now get Yahoo Japan’s reward points as compensation, which can then be used to to purchase many services on the Yahoo Japan site.

Our readers may recall that we previously featured this startup when it raised $3.75 million from three notable Japanese VC firms. They have brokered about $10 million worth of job matchings so far, and have more than 3,600 corporate clients ranging from listed companies to SMEs.

GREE (TYO:3632) and Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) have announced today that the companies will co-sponsor Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic bid. Beginning on December 26, both companies will roll out advertising in newspapers, public transport, and on the streets.

GREE and Yahoo Japan have helped to set up a website (ko-yaku2020.jp) where the public can pledge their support for the 2020 Olympic bid, along with celebrities and sports figures who have already done so. In a somewhat humorous way, you can write down what you promise to do if Tokyo is successful in its bid. As you can see below, GREE’s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka has pledged to make Tokyo a little greener by planting 2,020 plants in the city.

I really like that both these companies are throwing their support behind the Olympic bid. Although I can’t help but observe that this further illustrates the divergent strategies of GREE and its rival DeNA. GREE has been very aggressive in its marketing over the past year or so, with a huge presence at the Tokyo Game Show and E3, while DeNA took a pass. The company had billboards in San Francisco and ads in airports around the world.

But despite all this, it appears that DeNA has had the better year, both in terms of revenue and in terms of mindshare among gamers with its hit card battle title Rage of Bahamut, which we learned today has surpassed 10 million users.

From Yahoo Japan's financial report, Yahoo Japan News pages accessed compared to other domestic news sites

It seems there’s lots of news surrounding Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) today. Perhaps most notable is that the company announced its financial results for year to March 31, 2012, in which it saw sales and profit gains for the 15th straight year since its inception.

Do check out the entire financial presentation here, as it gives a great graphical overview (with lots of fun charts) of where the company excels, and why things are going well.

The company has a wide range of services, which it says are used by 84 percent of all internet users in Japan. It’s still number one in search, number one among auction sites (beating out Rakuten), and number one in e-mail (over Gmail and Microsoft’s Live Mail).

And it’s number one in news. As you can see in the chart from Yahoo in the upper right, Yahoo Japan News is accesses by more people than the news powerhouses of the Yomiuri, Mainichi, and Asahi.

Facebook comments, coincidentally, at the end of a Yahoo Japan News article (from CNet) about Facebook comments

Today, this is especially good news for Facebook, as Yahoo Japan News has introduced Facebook into its comment system. If you see the screenshot below, you can see that Facebook comments are now a tabbed option, right between native comments and real-time Twitter search [1].

The folks over at Asiajin point out that the company’s increased emphasis on social was a target area of focus noted by ex-CEO Masahiro Inoue on his departure. The company is also finding a surge in access from smartphones, and hopes to continue to serve more mobile content to capitalize on that trend.

One final pieces of news regarding Yahoo Japan today, as the company’s talks with Yahoo Inc on a share buyback (for Yahoo’s stake in Yahoo Japan) have concluded without agreement, due to a “valuation gap.”

Thanks to Akky over at Asiajin for pointing out that Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) now has the top three Twitter trending keywords listed front and center on its search page.

This builds upon Yahoo Japan’s partnership with Twitter from last summer, which saw the search portal integrate Tweets into various services on Yahoo Japan, namely at the subpage realtime.search.yahoo.co.jp.

Twitter’s top trends now get some prime real-estate on Yahoo’s front page (see below), being seen by audiences that it previously might not have reached. While we haven’t seen any updated figures for Japanese search market share, Yahoo Japan was the leading search destination for some time, although I would expect that Google has since made up some ground [1].

But regardless of search share, Yahoo Japan as a web destination is pretty popular, with almost 50 billion monthly page views, of which over 10 billion are from mobile [2]. As far as we can tell, however, this new display of Twitter trends only applies for the PC web view so far.

Photo: itmedia.co.jp

Here’s something I never really expected to see. Courtesy of the folks over at Softbank, and with some hardware help from Sharp, comes a Yahoo Phone. Set for release in Japan in late September, the Android-powered Softbank 009SH Y is the Yahoo doppleganger of the Aquos Phone 009SH.

Only it has a ‘Y.’

You were probably wondering why yourself, right? Why a Yahoo Phone?

Well despite the fact that Yahoo has seen better days in most regions, the service is still the dominant search engine in Japan, as we pointed out last month in our post on Baidu Japan’s continuing troubles. The most recent numbers we’ve seen showed it holding 56.2 percent market share, although of course it is powered by Google these days.

As for mobile, Softbank says that the home page for the smartphone edition of Yahoo Japan has seen six times the page views this June when compared to the same period a year ago. And of course, it’s expected to see even more traffic with initiatives such as this one.

For me, part of the lure of Android phones (were I to get one) is the fact that I’m a heavy user of many Google services, and the close integration is a big selling point. Similarly I’d imagine that for many casual internet/mobile users in Japan, the recognizable Yahoo brand would be seen as a trustworthy, with the Yahoo services offered being a similar draw.

Nonetheless, if I were one of the folks at Mountain View, I’d find it difficult not to snicker thinking that in Japan both the Yahoo Phone and Yahoo search are now powered by Google.

[Softbank via Techcrunch]

There are reportedly plans to increase the number of locations in the future, but for now this is a promising step. Besides publishing the data in map form and in HTML tables (I’ve machine translated them here), Yahoo is also publishing CSV files for each location, a good step in allowing the information to be repurposed by others. To find these files, users must click through to each location page and scroll down. (e.g. Here’s Chuo 2-chome, Aoba, Sendai) There is a graphical guide included as well to help viewers understand what the numbers mean.

Leave it to the little guys

Meanwhile, as we wait for government and local media to step up their game in making radiation information available to the public in a way that’s easy to understand, Safecast.org keeps chugging along on its shoestring budget that got an early boost of $37000 on Kickstarter.

Safecast is taking measurements and collecting its own data, but also aggregating data published by a number of other sources. They’re currently taking donations via Paypal, so I encourage you to pitch in a little. But I’m a little baffled as to why government or local media isn’t stepping up to send some funding its way considering that Safecast is doing work that they should be doing.

Check out Safecast’s field report from yesterday, with Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing fame in tow. Here’s what she was saying on Twitter yesterday:

Cautionary procedure back in Tokyo: shower first. Do readings on soles of shoes. Launder or throw away clothes, shoes, protective gear. Just as visual story of a painting is told as much by the “negative space,” the empty field—so is #Fukushima story told by the emptiness. The human toll, impact on countless evacuated families; whatever becomes of workers, cops, others remaining, ill-protected, ill-informed… ..that’s what I’m thinking abt. And this: there’s no truly safe place. Radiation travels in unexpected ways. Transparency & data save lives. The tendency for authorities to hide the worst information & protect authority for its own sake? That will kill people. Even with an abundance of reliable geigers, people who know how to use them, excellent data sharing systems? Very hard to define safety. And Japan lacks all of that right now. The people affected here want it badly. @safecastdotorg are doing critical work and need support.

Update from @seanbonner of Safecast: “[T]he data that Yahoo is publishing was collected by a joint Safecast/Keio university team. We designed, programmed and placed the sensors and then published the data they are brining, which Yahoo! is republishing.” (Sounds like Safecast is doing even more than we thought they were!)

Safecast maps radiation readings as they drive: safecast.org/drive/139

Baidu Japan actually opened in 2007, but required a relaunch in ’08 after a shaky start. Those accumulated losses seem to have been sunk into general running and admin costs.

The Japanese search engine market is dominated by Yahoo, although Yahoo search is now powered by Google in Japan. This graphic, from SearchEngineWatch.com, reveals that Yahoo Japan holds 56.2% of the marketshare in the country, with Google.co.jp on second with 31.3%. Baidu Japan squeezes into the small purple slice that’s badged ‘others’:

Image source: SearchEngineWatch.com - Showing search engine market share in Japan in mid-2010

Baidu’s filings, made at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), reveal that Baidu is only generating profit in its homeland. That’s in contrast to Google, which makes almost half of its profits – across search, advertising, and numerous other products – overseas.

Japan is the world’s third-biggest search market, behind the US and China. When Baidu.jp opened up in 2007, Baidu’s CEO Robin Li remarked:

We believe that with our proven strength in Chinese language search and our focus on delivering the best user experience, we will be able to provide Japanese users with a quality alternative to existing search engines.

But it has proved tougher than expected. Baidu Japan’s losses aren’t narrowing, and in fact have slowly inflated over the last three years, to 2010′s annual losses of RMB 260 million.

[Source of stats: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

Today, we are excited to announce that Tweets will be integrated into various services on Yahoo! Japan, beginning with real-time search results (see: realtime.search.yahoo.co.jp). This partnership will allow Twitter content to reach even more users in Japan, one of our biggest international markets. [Note: Link and parenthesis mine]

This comes hot on the heels of last month’s announcement that Twitter had struck a similar deal with service provider NTT Docomo to integrate content into search results. That partnership will enable mobile users (for both smartphones and feature phones) to view the microblog’s content via built-in Docomo services.

According to comScore, Japan is one of the top five countries in the world for Twitter penetration, with 16.8% reach dwarfing the global average of 7.4%. This figure will likely increase even more as a result of these two partnerships. The increasing popularity of smartphones in Japan (including Apple’s iPhone) should also help Twitter reach a wider audience in the nation.