Does anybody know anything about Japanese domain names?

[33S]

Hi. I'm looking into the crazy idea of regging some japanese domain names, but I don't know Japanese or anything about their market. I have the words I want to have in the domain, but I don't know how the Japanese put it.

I've found out .com is an OK choice for a japanese domain, a substantial amound of Japan's top sites are .COMs. Ans it's many times cheaper to reg than .jp.

I know IDN domains are available, for example 保険.com (xn--ruq843o.com) - "insurance" or 銀行.com (xn--jn2ax2s.com) - "bank". Those domains are registered, like some other popular words, but I haven't seen them being used by a functional website (I haven't seen a lot of them though).

Or you can reg english transliteration of the characters (like the ones google translate and dictionaries give), but this also is unclear. Some words that I thought would be 100% taken turned out to be vacant in both .jp and .com, however some were regged. Maybe there are special rules for domain transliteration. Like German "München" is "Muenchen" in non-IDN domains because of the "ü" .

Which way is better? IDN vs English letters? And does anybody know how does correct transliteration works?

Thanks

 

[Wisename]

i dont know about japanese domain name.
but i know about korean names.
i got one ! still available .. PEONDEU.COM means fund in korean language .

 

[Name Trader]

I would have thought you would need Japanese characters if you want to register Japanese domains.

 

[33S]

I would have thought you would need Japanese characters if you want to register Japanese domains.

If you want an IDN domains, then yes, but the characters when typed in get translated into something like xn--ruq843o.com (IDN code).
Guess what, GoDaddy doesn't want to register IDN. I wanted to register IDN code directly but I couldn't. Maybe double hyphens aren't allowed. And characters couldn't be registered too.

However the most popular sites there have English letter domains, even English words.
alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/JP

 

[Name Trader]

I'm not an expert at all on the Japanese market for domain names. But I don't suppose the companies on the alexa link you quote, are going to be buying your domain names. I would have thought it's more likely to be startups buying your domains. I would have thought, that unless they were exporters to an international market, their websites would be mostly in Japanese, with Japanese domain names. But I could be wrong.

 

[N-A]

I've lived in Okinawa, Japan for the past 8 or so years now. I can tell you:

• People don't use a .jp (which I just found out is restricted now) if they're a registered company, they will use .co.jp or .ne.jp
• Mom and pop shops brand, they don't need a generic name.
• I have not seen one advertisement for an IDN domain in any cc/TLD, rather the Japanese alphabet (Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana) inside a search box with a mouse over it. That has always puzzled me, because I could easily target those keywords. However, people don't here.
• .Info or anything cheap is preferred. There are so many extensions over here because of cellphone emails that it really doesn't matter (@softbank.ne.jp, @softbank.co.jp, @docomo.ne.jp, like 100s across all cellphone companies - it's worse than gTLD's trying to remember someone's address, but Android solved that problem for the most part).
• The ultimate choice is Romajii (Roman alphabet a-z) of the business name with hyphens, unless their market is international. Then the approach would be the same, but I'll stop there...
• Research the market before you buy any IDN's. There is a market for them and you can sell them, you just need to know who to approach and how.