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Originally Posted by mamster
I'd prefer not to embed fonts unless there's a good reason to.
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Fine. Usage of some Japanese characters in an otherwise Latin-based text seems a good reason to me (with the current generation of ebook readers, at least). I assume you mean hiragana/katakana/kanji characters, and not just Latin letters with diacritics used for transliteration. If it's the latter, then it's not so clear... but still it's a valid reason.
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Are there any common platforms that will fail to render my Japanese text if I don't embed fonts?
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Yes. ADE, as you found out, and most dedicated hardware ebook readers, which are based on the same rendering engine as ADE.
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Do I need to worry about ADE?
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About ADE itself, maybe not so much. But it's probably the best "emulator" for ebook readers.
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Does anyone even use it anymore?
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Well... almost everyone who buys ePub books has to use ADE for downloading them. But see above, anyway.
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What's the best practice for this situation?
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You cannot expect the default fonts in every reader to include all possible Unicode characters. So as soon as you are including some exotic ones (and Japanese is exotic in most American and European countries) it's a good idea to embed a font. But code the CSS such that it's very simple to disable the font, so an interested user (or yourself in the future) can easily do that. With this I mean, for instance, using the embedded font in a single class, and using multiple classes in HTML elements if needed, rather than using the embedded font in multiple classes.