In America, Computer Science researchers very rarely submit to journals, because in our field conferences are thought to be more important. The reason being that 1) conferences offer more up-to-date information, 2) conferences allow a wider auidence to see your research and 3) the top 2 or 3 tiers of conferences have a lower acceptance rate than the highest tier journals.

However, in Japan, or at least where I am at, people beat you over the head with journals and will do everything they can not to help pay for you to go to international conferences. In the past year, most of my conversations with professors have only been them telling me “When will you have an IEEE or ACM journal” or “Have you got any results from IEEE or ACM” and when I wanted to do a special session at an international conference I got “conferences are not important only journals matter real researchers only publish in journals.”

In general I get the feeling that outside of the U.S. journals are thought to be like bars of gold, meaning you cannot have enough. This is probably the reason why you find very few Americans as journal editors. It also is probably why when native English speakers submit their papers they get the lovely comments of “Your English is bad,” “Your English is Illegal,” “I cannot understand your paper, please check your English” and of course some helpful people even like to correct your English with incorrect English!