Then why pray tell does Apple do so well there?
Because Apple is dominant worldwide. It's either Apple for their iPhone, or HTC (Taiwan), Samsung/LG (South Korea), Xiaomi/Huawei (China).
And even then, phones like the Sony Xperia Z3 were the best selling smartphone. All around the world, Sony Xperia sales are down, except in Japan, a place where Samsung struggles so much, they remove their Samsung name from their phones, only being Docomo Galaxy, so that the South Korean, cheapness, inferior perception goes away.
A lot of you guys are acting like this is news you've never heard before. So extrapolate that to consoles. Unless the Xbox was some unique console that provided something so stupendous that Japanese gamers just had to have it, there is nothing they can do that would make them an instant buy over homegrown Sony and Nintendo.