What with all the hubbub over the down 'n' dirty warfare being waged in this country by competing digital music download services all scrambling for a bigger chunk of the market, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the iTunes Music Store is still mostly a U.S. phenomenon. At least, it's easy for us, since we've been able to buy songs and albums with a few deft clicks for well over a year, now, so we're way past taking it for granted. And Germany, France, and the UK may just now be settling into the same sort of "we got ours" complacency now that they've had access to the service for a few months. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is still struggling in that most inconceivable and horrifying of states: iTMSlessness. Maybe Sally Struthers should do a fundraising commercial.

On a strictly emotional level, we probably feel most sorry for Canada, since it's right up north, there, watching us all across the border merrily One-Clicking our way into the poorhouse while racking up a healthy collection of embarrassing hits from the '70s and '80s. (A note to fellow geographically disinclined U.S. denizens: Canada is, in fact, not a state, but is instead a whole other country, like Alaska.)

From a business perspective, though, we have a feeling that Apple is hurting more by not having an iTMS available in Japan. The Japanese are, of course, extremely tech-savvy as a culture, and would likely consider the act of purchasing and downloading legally licensed digital songs as natural as jabbing an arcade game butt with a big plastic finger. And don't forget, the iPod is huge over there-- not in the sense that it seems physically huge because of their smaller hands, but in the sense that it's stomping all competing portable players into the dust, Sony's included, on Sony's home turf.

So why no iTMS Japan? Well, apparently it all comes down to different cultural expectations regarding the consumption of music. According to The Asahi Shimbun (which, no matter how many times we hear its name, sounds like some sort of steamed pastry filled with a sweet red bean paste), Japanese record execs refuse to license their catalogs to Apple both because of pricing, and because they "deem its copy protection measures to be inadequate." It seems that their biggest objection is that customers are allowed to-- gasp!-- burn songs onto CDs! And that's a big no-no over there.

The reason this strikes us as a fundamentally different cultural attitude toward music consumption is because CDs in Japan reportedly cost on the order of $30 apiece, so yeah, buying an album from the iTMS for the equivalent of ten or even twenty clams and then burning it onto a blank CD-R yields a decent legal copy that's scads cheaper, and that spells trouble for the industry. Also, $30 per CD is expensive enough that apparently the Japanese have CD rental shops just like video stores where you can take home the hottest new releases for a buck or two, listen to them for a few days, and then take them back. (Be kind; rewind.)

So apparently the Japanese are okay with renting music instead of owning it, but it's into this culture that Apple wants to sell 99-cent downloads, when reportedly renting a CD single is less than a dime cheaper. So would anybody take the trouble to go out and rent a single instead of buying the song online for a few cents more? The CD rental shops would go out of business, CD sales would plummet, the whole economy would tank overnight, and the entire nation would sink into the ocean to be devoured by an enormous radioactive sea creature that would then go on to be defeated by Godzilla, because he's the man.

For its part, Apple Japan remains upbeat; the company's marketing veep says that the continuing success of the iPod will eventually force the labels to relent, and that they "won't be able to swim against the tide forever." But how long will it take before Apple can bring the iTMS to the Land of the Rising Sun? A year? Two? Yeesh, we bet even the Canadians won't have to wait that long.