[Snorkledorf]

Sure enough, that's really lame. The US model covers Japan, but the Japan model doesn't even make the hop to Korea...

But wait, can the US PW handle Japanese now? Amazon's page says:

Works in Your Language

Kindle Paperwhite can be used in English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. You can easily select the language that you are most comfortable with, and enjoy instant dictionary lookups in any of these languages.

Global Content Support

Kindle Paperwhite supports the display of non-Latin characters, so you can read books and documents in your favorite language, including enhanced support for Japanese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). Kindle Paperwhite also displays Korean, Cyrillic, Latin, and Greek scripts, and provides free access to several international dictionaries.

So you can run it in Japanese, and display Japanese content? This sounds just like my PW-J, except I'm lacking Traditional Chinese. When did this support for Japanese happen? Was it like that from the start, or was it included in an update? Does that include vertical, and right-to-left text? If so, I'm not really seeing much hardware advantage in buying it in Japan.

Of course access to the Japanese store is admittedly kinda useful...

The 5.3.0 update (that's what my PW-J is running out of the box) says it includes for example the Simplified Chinese support that I'm seeing here, so is the hardware otherwise the same, except for the sucky 3G in Japan? I'm beginning to think that it might be more advantageous to buy it cheaper from the US and see about registering it with the Japanese store. Not sure you can do that though.