SonyEricsson’s Bravia phone announced for Japan

I still own a SonyEricsson mobile phone (the old T610), but the newer models including the smartphones have not been impressing me much lately and it seemed to me as if they were doing what most mobile phone companies and telcoms are doing: targeting the teenager group.At first this seemed to have changed: SonyEriccson’s SO903iTV is going to be the first to include a 3″ Bravia display and offer some nice features, such as built in TV receiver with time-shifted recording options, a microSD for memory and a 2 megapixel camera. So this seems like a rich feature handset with a nice design by a decent company. But once again: the phone is to be released in Japan.
I have to wonder why it is that the Japanese market, a quite small one in fact, is so much more technologically advanced than for example our quite large European and American markets.