Sega has said that it does not have any plans to localize Yakuza 5 to countries outside of Japan.
Yakuza’s creator revealed the bad news during an interview with EDGE:
We don’t have a plan for that at the moment. The Yakuza Studio team is a fixed size, and we have to choose between forging ahead with the next game or localising the one that just came out. This time the size of the game was so large, so rather than localising that game we chose to focus our manpower on the new game. But we get asked about it a lot. We get lots of complaints!
Personally, I’m one to complain. Every other Yakuza game released had a Western version. There’s point in importing a copy of Yakuza 5 from Japan either, unless you can read Japanese text.
Hopefully there is enough demand for Yakuza 5 in the West so Sega changes their mind…