Japanese Neopets Explained

Neopets has expanded its international marketing to a more asian driven market, that being Japan! Thus, when you travel around the neopets sites, you may find on chat or through some random testing, domains such as www.neopets.com.jp and others such as www.neopets.com.au. Who knows? Maybe they’re on the look out to create a domain extension for every single country out there, or nearly all the major countries which neopets receives a substantial amount of users from.

When the first signs of Japanese banners started appearing, there was a big debate whether or not it was Chinese or Japanese Neopets was being translated to. This centered around the argument that the characters were Chinese rather than Japanese. To clear this up, Japanese consists of various scripts. One of the scripts is called ‘Kanji’ which is pictorials which represent words. The Japanese adapted this script from the Chinese, thus Japanese and Chinese may look very similar and at times confused and hard to distinguish between the two.
(more…)