What's Japan been smoking?

It was very strange to hear that the latest weekly (yes weekly... not for the year) numbers coming out of Japan had the Xbox 360 outselling the Ps3. Not only had this never happened before, but the Xbox360 had never even been close to anything but last gen handhelds. This push in sales for the 360 was attributed to Japan's love for the Ace Combat series. I shrugged when Sony lost exclusivity for this franchise, but apparently it meant more than I thought.

Now we have the numbers for the second week of November in Japan and it got even weirder. Xbox went back to selling a few dozen consoles, but the Playstation 3 actually outsold the Wii. This happening the week after Mario Galaxy is insanity. What's even crazier? Not only did the PS3 sell about 10 times more than the 360, but that sold about 20,000 more units than the Wii. Not only did they finally outsell the Wii.... but to nearly double it in sales so shortly after it lost to the 360 is astonishing.

Another oddity is the PSP also outsold the Wii by about 20,000 units as well. I fully expected the PSP sales to drop off after the release of FF7: CC but they have actually been consistently closer to the sales of the Nintendo DS.

Is Japan starting to re-embrace Sony again? Unfortunately, I doubt it. What it sounds like is Japan has damn good advertising and every time a new game comes out the people go crazy and buy its respective console. Ok maybe not... but something weird is definitely going on here. Just what the hell came out over there on the Ps3 anyway?

-Brad