The development team at Yahoo! have come out o announce the release of a Japanese version of their instant messaging client, mainly Yahoo! Messenger 9. This news follows a recent update to Yahoo! Messenger 9, version 9.0.0.2136 which should fix some compatibility issues the software application was experiencing. It should also provide a fix to users that could not install Yahoo! Messenger altogether.

“Starting this week, Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 is now available in Japanese. Note that features can vary by international version, so if you’re considering the Japanese version, you may want to check out their features page to get the scoop. Congratulations to the Japan team on the launch!” comments Product Manager with the Yahoo! Messenger team, Sarah Bacon.

We already took a look at the features page, and to no surprise everything was in Japanese and since we are not literate in this language, we cannot accurately say to what degree the English version varies compared to the Japanese one. Here are the features we already know and like in Yahoo! Messenger 9: instant messaging, chat rooms, photo sharing, PC-to-PC calls, PC-to-Phone calls, text messaging, webcam support, conferences, file transfer, mobile forwarding, stealth settings, voicemail, plug-ins, audibles, emoticons, skins, games, and many more. You can see a detailed, fill list of features here.

On a personal note, I can only hope that the Japanese version of Yahoo! Messenger 9 turns out not to be as problematic as the English one. As I’ve previously mentioned, pretty much all previous versions of Yahoo!’s instant messaging client have shown some form of bug or annoyance which did nothing more that to turn people away from YM 9 and towards the older but more stable YM 8. I don’t know how Japanese users will react to Y M9 bugs, but according to Google, about 300.000 people are terrified of their Chinese neighbors. To my mind they should be more scared of the Japanese since they are the ones to have spawned ninjas and samurais.

If you would like to get Yahoo! Messenger 9 in Japanese, a download location is available here.