Facebook began gaining more traction in Japan once they setup a special office in Tokyo and let them make tweaks to the product only for the Japanese market - AFAIK, this was a unique case for them at the time, and they didn't do anything besides basic localization (which they crowdsourced...) for other nations. One of the things they did to show that they understood Japanese culture was to add a blood-type field to user profiles, a superstitious statistic that's nevertheless prevalent there. Before that, it felt too foreign.

Anecdotal but I've had many more of my Japanese and Korean friends abroad join Facebook in the last year or two.

I agree that those helped, but when the people around me started using facebook was right around the time "Social Network" came out in Japan.

I used to be on Mixi, and I and most people I know have pretty much stopped using it. When they started tying in their services to other APIs like Twitter, etc, I think is when they really jumped the shark.

(Also, Mixi is not really a Facebook clone, per say, as they both launched in the same month. I would say they were just another SNS that was more geared towards the Japanese market)

An interesting (albeit smaller scale) approach would be Panic software's Audion application - http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

At one point they were the highest selling piece of software (mac or pc) in Japan, which they achieved via a Japanese distributor - not sure if that counts as an office in the country or not.

The reverse is also true: Chinese and Japanese web companies have a high language/cultural barrier to entry in Western countries.

So does anyone have any good examples or suggestions? :)