As I'm trying to wear out my mind enough to get some slumber before I have to turn over my half-busted bicycle to the repair shop on Monday I've gotten the keen interest to find non-english sims throughout the Main Grid. And I'll tell you, Secondlife truly never sleeps. Just by looking through one of my older landmarks to a merchant that resides in a large cluster of sims that are primarily owned and operated by Japanese individuals, I found a quite an interesting variety of locales. Granted, like most of SL it's still mostly commercial, but beyond that there were many other odd areas such a micro-savannah plot with simple prim'd animals and trees that looked like something out of an old National Geographic documentary. But among these sims seem to be also very savvy sim owners. For example, as I look through the map browser to find actual users (there are some, but many are not able to speak english and I can't speak a lick of Japanese), I noticed there were some sims either in part or in whole containing an advert that only one could clearly see from the browser. It's not unlike some of the adverts one can find in Google, although it's probably not an efficient use of resources considering the price range of sims, but it's certainly a novelty that seems like something LL should consider if they really are not getting the return on their investment as they believe.

Anyways, among the commercial parts of the sims beyond the adverts that caught my eye is the subtle difference in artistic stylings. Take any old US/EU skin creator, many of these folks focus on either extreme realism or some form of extreme pseudo-mannerism (stark lighting and rich color palettes). But the Japanese skin creators by comparison tend toward subtle shading and almost pastel color palettes. It's not that I their style is superior, but that it's markedly different. Even some of their clothes focus on more traditional trends among Japanese subcultures, but with a stricter adherence to their historical originas such as the Lolita dresses and the like, which look more like Edwardian/Victorian period pieces than Goth/Scenester clothing.

And my final observation about the Japanese sims is this: they're growing. As much as they don't look massive compared to the cluster of sims that some companies and individuals own in SL, many of these sims owned by Japanese firms and individuals are clearly building up and they're quite organized. Organized in the sense that there is strict planning in plot arrangement (similar to RL city street grid layout) and each plot that isn't sold is demarcated with a sale sign with all the important data laid out (of course in Kanji and the other non-english languages [but with the numerals that we all use today]). I suspect if LL gets their act together on sim management (and possibly doing the same for the Linden Exchange), they could take full advantage of this clear growth in the Grid, rather than just spinning their wheels.