[Torgo]

Am I to understand then that there is a parallel online hacking community populated by Japanese-speakers? I have never really run across this, just blogs randonly-dispersed.

[nandemo]

Of course there is! After all, the majority of Japanese developers don't speak English.

There's also a lot of offline activity: meetups, study groups and (less commonly) hackathons.

For example, look at JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group)'s schedule:

http://jaws-ug.jp/