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Anyone familiar with the conservative nature of big Japanese business will tell you that Toshiba’s decision to drop HD DVD like a hot brick was almost unseemly in its haste, even though the firm had little choice.

One of the marketing bigwigs behind Blu-ray has gone public with an astonishing claim that Toshiba has only itself to blame for the flop that was HD DVD.

Even though we’ve heard of some fantastic customer service for Japanese early adopters of the failed HD DVD format, it seems not everyone’s happy with the brave face being put on by Toshiba.

Amid the rush to wring the last few pennies out of HD DVD’s rancid and yellowing corpse, at least one retailer has had the decency to front up and look after its unfortunate customers.

Should you happen to be one of those people who arranges the books on their shelves alphabetically, you’ll probably like the new recordable media from Panasonic that allow you to record the summer Olympics on Olympic-branded disks.

After yesterday’s Toshiba HD DVD pullout there are still a few loose ends that need to be tied up, so we took to the streets of Tokyo to see how electronics retailers are handling the HD DVD wake in Toshiba’s hometown.

We saw recently how Japanese sales figures for high-definition video recorders make worrying reading for the backers of HD DVD, so it’s no surprise that the latest data on the market for players and recorders as a whole shows more of the same.

It’s hard to know what to make of the latest statistics on the battle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD DVD because of the fact that they’re from Japan, home of so many of Blu-ray’s biggest backers. Nevertheless, the degree to which HD DVD has fallen behind in Japan in sales of the crucial high-end HD TV recorders is stark.

To pimp the Japanese HD DVD release of all 1,450 minutes of the original Star Trek in 1080p glory, the HD DVD promo body has decked out its booth attendants in appropriate regalia at CEATEC this week.

If there’s one sure thing about the so-called HD TV format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD it’s that none of us should be rushing out to buy either right now. The latest high-definition recorders from Toshiba Japan underline that in heavy red ink.

As expected, Samsung today announced that it will join LG in releasing a dual-format high-definition video player that supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Toshiba’s ass-kicking RD-A1 HD DVD recorder with a 1TB hard drive went on sale this morning, after a delay of a few weeks natch, for the wallet-kicking sum of ¥398,000, or about US$3,400.