Why is .lzh format still popular with japs?

The rest of the world uses .zip and .rar and these retards still seem to use .lzh a lot.

It's not because the format itself was constructed by a "fellow" Jap is it?

That's because of solid compression. You can do the same with RAR, TAR+BZIP2, and any archiver that doesn't suck (oops ZIP).

I just want everyone to know that tar+bzip2 is complete garbage. To get at a single file you need to decompress the bz2. There is no random access within the file. And guess what? You can do the same shit with zip! zOMG!

Think of it like this:
zip -0 = tar
zip -9 = gzip -9

Guess what would happen if I used the second on the first? WHOA!