With Apple’s iPhone launching soon in Japan, and a lot of hot air on blogs and in the press about why the iPhone will or won’t be a hit in Japan, it’s time to take a look at aspects of Apple’s iPhone. it was a flop in Japan, that country where feature-rich, all-in-one cell phones are the norm, and paying the equivalent of $500 per phone isn’t unusual.

1. Carriers will kill Apple’s iPhone in Japan. The Japanese market is literate with the carcasses of failed foreign mobiles. Motorola’s smartphone is relegated to the back pages of catalogues, and the Blackberry isn’t even offered as a consumer device. Nokia has had limited success (or at least not outright failure) with SoftBank, but the Razr barely made an impact with DoCoMo, and it doesn’t even bother. Apple’s iPhone will enter the Japan market in this shadow of death, and Apple’s insistence on doing a deal on its own terms will see carriers favor the more foldable Japanese manufacturers.

2. Its foreign character will end the Apple iPhone in Japan. As noted above, foreign phones come to Japan to die. From a consumer standpoint, Apple’s iPhone will have to show that it understands the Japanese consumer, a consumer who likes the way their current phones work, who is used to a numeric keypad, and for whom an alphanumeric input might even be a novelty, since the penetration of computers, not only at home but also at work, is quite low. Does Apple’s iPhone really understand the Japanese mobile phone consumer?

3. Almost non-existent public Wi-Fi will kill Apple’s iPhone in Japan. One great thing about the iPhone is the seamless switch from WiFi to mobile networks. However, in Japan, public hotspots are a rarity, and the only option is often to steal from a private individual’s misconfigured home router. Most coffee shops and train stations don’t have a wireless connection, so the Japanese iPhone user will stick with the slower and more expensive 3G network.

4. The keyboard will kill Apple’s iPhone in Japan. As hinted above, almost all Japanese people are intimately familiar with their mobile phone keyboard, while few are regular typists. Not only that, but Japanese keyboards, instead of using the Western alphabet-based system (a key rotates through ABCabc, etc.), use kana-based syllabic input, so the keys rotate through from KA-KI-KU-KE-KO, for example). Japanese iPhone users will need to be able to type with one hand dangling from a strap on a moving train, a task that the current iPhone keyboard simply isn’t up to.

5. No strap eyelets will kill the Apple iPhone in Japan. This is a bit silly, admittedly, but it’s the little things that can make a difference and illustrate that Steve Jobs understands the Japanese market. One way the Japanese express their individuality is to decorate their cell phone with straps; cute characters, screen cleaners, branded straps; Japanese of all ages will want to do the same with their iPhone, and with no eyelet on the current model, Apple denies them this option.

Given these factors above, it’s no wonder that Apple’s iPhone in Japan is destined not to be as successful as it was in the United States.