One of the biggest barriers to foreign companies getting into the Japanese market is not malevolent but cultural and organisational: Japan has such a labyrinthine distribution system that it is very hard for outsiders – or newcomers to get their goods into the supply chain, but now someone is going to do something about it, and it’s not an angry American or a canny German company: Sega Enterprises Ltd has been breaking the mould in the video games business by walking all over one-time runaway leader Nintendo Co, and now it plans to by-pass the Japanese distribution system and sell direct to retailers.
