I am bilingual living in Japan.
There was a show CALLED buzzerbeater on TV in Japan very recently. I think i wrote about that somewhere in suggestions formula.
Get this game on MIXI or GREE . Those are social networking sites equivalent of Myspace and facebook.... Is this game linkedi n facebook or myspace at all for US etc...??
You'll need full translation to get general Japanese public. The English reading/writing capable population of Japan is TINEY, also not that many people really have computers at home and are using them regularly. Everyone is on their cell though, so if you had a cellular interface for this game, in Japanese that would be HUGE potential for tons of players.
You'll have to kill the faces on the players and adjectives I think, for a cellphone you want little GIFs and text, numbers etc.
Anyway I think it would be awesome to have a skin that has no cartoon faces and adjectives because personally I hate that display. I'd rather see all the skills as number and no face on teh players. I like the readout on the set your lineup page best, shows minutes and stats as numbers, everything you need to know.
If that was the readout roughly for your team, plus salary and stuff like that, that would work for a cellphone, or for me as a small display that isn't embarrassing to look at at work. Oh and for slow computers, less graphic junk means faster load.
You could easily have thousands of Japanese users if you made cellphone Japanese etc. Not sure if anyone would pay though. Lots of cellphone games are free here. So maybe not a market worth going after without like Japanese sponsors to put adds on the cellphone pages and stuff.