English naturalist Charles Darwin put Galapagos on the map, having visited the group of islands, situated in the Pacific Ocean some 970 km west of continental Ecuador, in 1835, during the voyage of the HMS Beagle. His impressions and observations of the islands' unique biosystem contributed to his 1859 magnum opus, "On the Origin of Species."
Now jump to Japan a century and a half later, when one of the buzz words shortlisted for 2010's "word of the year" was gara-kei (short for Garapagos keitai), used in the context of how Japan's mobile telephone technology functions as a separate entity from the rest of the world. Certainly from the standpoint of market penetration, Japanese manufacturers lag considerably behind Nokia, Samsung, Apple and others — although adoption of Google's Android mobile operating system may help put them back in the running.
Beyond cell phones, the Galapagos analogy has been expanded to cover other products developed to appeal solely to Japan's domestic consumers and, by extension, in a figurative sense to suggest that even Japan's society is evolving apart from outside influences.