Just watching the TNT live show and obviously for the Giantbomb crew, its inferior to Dance Central, but theres that huge community in Japan who do dance routines and upload them crazy. Like BeckiiCruel I guess? Its pretty clearly that style of dancing and I could see it being really big among that sort of crowd. That is to say, mostly girls in Japan? 
 
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if its quite a lot more popular there than...anywhere eelse.

Did they not show Child of Eden? I missed the first half.

I can't imagine Kinect doing that well in Japan, given the limited audience the 360 console itself already has.

They might be missing something.

Well Im only going from the style of dancing and the huge amount of girls who upload videos of themselves dancing in the same style lol . Although a lot of it is on sites other than Youtube. But yeah they really should of just done a licensed game...

This is a weird niche title and Japanese people will spend 500+ usd on crap just for novelty sake. They are the kings of spending tons of money on weird peripherals that only work on one or two games.  (All the crazy wii controllers, densha de go, card captor controllers etc.)
 
The biggest limiting factor is how much room it takes to get a good reading with Kinect. Most Japanese living rooms are small, with bedrooms being even smaller. So that will be the biggest reason I believe Kinect will have such a hard time making any headway in Japanese households.

Dance Masters suffers from: 1) 12th game of the day... and 2) a bit more... vague (?) (at least for them, for the 12th game) definition of what you should do....
 
It strikes me as (odd? late, many drinks) that they emphasize hand positions (as if it was a Wii game) over full body movement for the expert mode -- 1/2 to 2/3 moves to hit hand marks vs. body positions and (other than the full body things) no leg movements at all...
 
From the DDR folks (where feet are king) it's a complete reversal (as it were)...

" This is a weird niche title and Japanese people will spend 500+ usd on crap just for novelty sake. They are the kings of spending tons of money on weird peripherals that only work on one or two games.  (All the crazy wii controllers, densha de go, card captor controllers etc.) The biggest limiting factor is how much room it takes to get a good reading with Kinect. Most Japanese living rooms are small, with bedrooms being even smaller. So that will be the biggest reason I believe Kinect will have such a hard time making any headway in Japanese households. "

Yeah, the people who made the observation of size of rooms here make a valid point.  Sure if you're outside Tokyo in a house, you have a much more american-size living room where it'd work, but for those of us that live in the city itself, it's really hard to get that kinda room in your room.  I live in a share house (basically a big house where everyone has private rooms, but we share kitchen/living room and stuff) and Kinect would work in the communal living room, but not in any of our personal rooms. 
 
Additionally, 360s have a pretty low saturation.  You're going to be targeting the audience that: has a 360, has the space to use Kinect properly, will buy a Kinect.  That's a very very tiny niche.  
 
If anything, some kind of kinect-arcade version would meet with the most success probably I feel.   Now if they made an AKB48 version of this, it'd probably sell on name alone.
 
@OldGuy: There seemed to be step registration on some of Jeff's lef movements when he played on Expert, less so on Standard.  

Yeah you're right, not everyone can have beckiicruel size bedrooms lol

the songs in dance masters sound more like eurobeat than jpop (since i didn't see any japanese songs), which ddr had a lot of before. it might do well in europe since Just Dance is supposedly huge over there.