I just have to say thank you so much for this comment!
I do a lot of Japanese text editing and I've also been learning Vim recently, but I had no idea that Vim recognizes Japanese words. Many times I've thought, "It's too bad I can't (effectively) use Vim for Japanese also," but I was just assuming it wouldn't be able to parse the words without spaces.
I just tried it and my mind was blown when w moved forward in completely logical increments without plugins or anything. I still can't believe something like Vim would include a native Japanese parser, but now I think it's time to rethink my workflow...
EDIT: I just tested some more and realized there isn't actually a semantic parser, but it's just treating any grouping of one syllabary (kanji, hiragana, katakana) as a word. Except for some debatable weirdness around conjugated verbs, it actually feels fairly natural given the rhythm of the different characters used in Japanese.
It's funny how there are regional differences in this. I'm from Finland and for some reason Emacs is very popular here too. But I guess it comes from the fact that some default keybindings in Vim are horrible to type with a Finnish keyboard layout. On the other hand, it doesn't take a whole lot of customization to get comfortable with Vim.
Interestingly if you want to do any Japanese text editing, most IDE's or editors fail horribly. I almost always find myself falling back to Vim.
Mind you, I really like textmate. Sadly, it sucks at Japanese. And will for the time being.