<i>I have to say I’m shocked by this news, especially considering that Bing will be behind Yahoo’s primary search engine here in the states and in Europe.</i><p>Bing seems to lack mobile search. While there search page is optimized for mobile, they don't seem to rank mobile differently. That alone could be a deal killer for the Japanese market.
Yahoo Japan is very much a separate entity from Yahoo.com.<p>For instance, they're still operating geocities.jp, whereas the .com (and all the others) has closed, and in general they seem to be able to make a go of things where the .com version falters.
Sounds like a good test of a plan b.<p>Also there's some bullcrap at the end. Most of the time in yahoo history the "heart" of it was done by a 3rd party company,e.g. google. Which became a company we know only after yahoo used them as their search engine long ago