Having conquered the US and some of the European markets, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is gearing up to sell the iPhone in mobile-crazy Japan. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently met with NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) president Masao Nakamura to discuss a possible deal. Of course, Apple’s hedging its bets—or is it ratcheting up the negotiating pressure?—by also talking to Softbank, Japan’s third largest operator.

The negotiations with DoCoMo have apparently hit a familiar sticking point: The revenue share that Apple tries to extract from the carrier that will exclusively carry the iPhone. No one knows what that magic number is, but it’s apparently in line with what Apple has asked of other carriers. The WSJ says that estimates put the figure at 10 percent, but in the past Spanish operator Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) has let it out of the bag that Apple was trying to get as much as 30 percent.

Softbank, meanwhile wants the deal badly—it’s been aggressively trying to steal market share from its larger competitors and having the iPhone would help it do this. But Apple is more interested in partnering with number one carrier DoCoMo, as the Cupertino-based company has shown a past penchant for signing on the top network. It doesn’t expect to have difficulty closing the deal with DoCoMo.

Japan—with its 100 million mobile subscribers—is an important market in helping Apple hit its internal goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, which would give it 1 percent of the global handset market. Moreover, Japanese consumers are used to snapping up high-end phones at hundreds of dollars a go and buy a new phone on average every two years.

Carlo adds: One other point being missed by a lot of the outlets reporting this story is that there are no 2G GSM networks in Japan, so any launch there on DoCoMo or Softbank would require a 3G iPhone, which of course, is yet to be announced.

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