Reflections on Drupal in Japan
I spent the last week in Japan. The goal was two-fold: meet with the Drupal community to understand how we can grow Drupal in Japan, and evaluate the business opportunity to incorporate an Acquia subsidiary in Japan (we already offer Acquia Cloud in Japan using Amazon's Tokyo data center).
I presented at two Drupal meetups in Japan; spent the week meeting with members of the Drupal community, Drupal agencies, large system integrators (IBM, Accenture, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Ci&T and SIOS) and the Japanese government. In between meetings, I enjoyed the amazing food that Japan has to offer.
The community in Japan is healthy; there are some noteworthy Japanese Drupal sites and there are passionate leaders that organize meetups and conferences. The Japanese Drupal community is bigger than the Chinese Drupal community but compared to North America and Europe, the Japanese Drupal community is relatively small; the largest Drupal agency I met with employs 20 developers.
The large system integrators, with the exception of Ci&T, have not done any Drupal projects in Japan. We're way behind our competitors like Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager and SDL in this regard. All of them enabled the large system integrators to sell and use their products. It was great to meet with all the system integrators to make them aware of Drupal, and the potential it could have to their business. It's clear the large system integrators could benefit from an Open Source platform that allows them to move faster and integrate with more systems.
The biggest challenge is the lack of Japanese documentation; both marketing materials as well as developer documentation. Most of the Japanese do not have much confidence in their English speaking ability and struggle to use Drupal or to participate on drupal.org. My recommendation for the Japanese Drupal community is to organize regular translation sprints. Translating one or more of the best-selling English Drupal books to Japanese could also be a game-changer for the community.
Another problem has been the historic challenges with drupal.jp. The anonymous owner of the domain drupal.jp claims that drupal.jp is the official Drupal site in Japan (it's not officially approved) and runs it without much regard or consultation with the broader Japanese Drupal community. I promised the Japanese community to help fix this.
I returned from my trip feeling that the Japanese market offers a great opportunity for Drupal. Japan is the world's third-largest economy, after the United States and China. With continued leadership, Drupal could be huge in Japan. I’d love that, as I would like to go back and visit Japan again.