I will readily admit I don't understand Japanese culture very well. The concept of corporate shaming tactics is something I encountered a few years in in some books about global business practice, so HJ's motivations are likely outside my ability to conceptualize (I'm neither Japanese nor a major business).
Honor and shame are IME huge parts of Japanese society. But it's often difficult, especially for westerners, to predict when and where they will accrue. Because these things are subject to local tradition, and because the western twin concepts of shame and honor are a little different than the eastern ones, and because honor/shame is hardly the only difference between our cultures and the other differences may interact in unpredictable ways, and because westerners are usually not subject to this system so it's hard to learn by doing, and because of probably a billion other reasons that I'm still too dense to grasp despite having spent a good chunk of my life out here.
But I put a big stock in people behaving the way they have in the past, and I've seen quite a few examples now where Japanese companies are shamed by not being able to deliver products they had promised to customers. So until I see otherwise, I have to believe that's how it plays out here.
But the idea of trying to shame WotC into rescinding their decision to revoke HJ's license was the only thing that made sense to me.
I think it's obvious that HJ was simply reporting the contents of their communication with WotC. Despite what some people are saying, there's actually nothing in HJ's press release that contradicts anything that any wotc employees have said thus far. (It's perfectly possible for WotC to simultaneously have a policy against licensing translations, while at the same time employing managers for whom translations are very much on their mind.)
Why might WotC have told HJ this, and not informed them that they weren't abandoning the market? I can imagine a few possibilities...
--Straight up crappy communication with non-core business partners (wotc's D&D department is a bit of a repeat offender in this respect)
--Genuine doubt within wotc as to future participation in the TTRPG market
--An understaffed overworked D&D department simply not being able to handle their workload during the big launch, and handing communication off to some junior legal assistant who doesn't know or care about mearls' plans
What's
not reasonable in my view is to impugn HJ's motives or core competence, or to (as some were doing above) impugn the functional literacy of our bilingual message board members.
