StreetPass is not that big of a thing here in the States. I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, take public transit w/ hundreds of people to work, carry my 3DS w/ me everywhere and even in the summers when I take lunchtime walks through a very popular park filled w/ toursits, I get maybe two or three StreetPasses a week. I will tell you it's a whole different story in Tokyo.

Standing outside a fairly crowded train station--not a huge transit hub like Tokyo Station or anything like that, mind you--I'd get a SpotPass every few minutes. Actually riding the train virtually guaranteed a few as well. During rush hour, you will almost certainly get ten, which is the most you can get at once, on your way to work and likely if you checked halfway through your trip, you'd wind up getting even more than that. There are also places like Akihabara (aka Tokyo Electronic Town) where there are groups of people sitting around and playing 3DS where you can basically stand around and get as many StreetPasses as you care to get. I stood there for twenty minutes or so collecting street passes and playing Puzzle Swap and as soon as I got through one group of people in puzzle swap, I'd have eight to ten more street passes waiting for me. It is pretty incredible to say the least--and an enourmous amount of fun.

All of this kind of makes me wonder where the 3DSes are in the US. Certainly, there is not as many per capita here but the 3DS is still selling quite well in the US. Certainly, it is not many dozen times more popular in Japan as it is here as the amount of StreetPasses I get would indicate. I suspect the likely culprit is simply that people don't carry them around w/ them here. Also, the US being much less safe than Japan, perhaps people keep their SpotPass feature turned off to avoid potential problems (or maybe that is just one more reason to leave it at home). In any case, it is kind of a drag that more people don't take advantage of StreetPass here for whatever reason. It really is a whole different world where people actually use it.