Has it been confirmed yet whether we'll be able to transfer Japanese characters to Western servers when those launch?
So far it's not even possible to transfer between ships, the ships (servers) are separated, and when you create a character in one ship, you can't use that character in other ships.
A note, Ship 02 is the ship of choice for alot english speaking communities.
Sakai did say that he'll consider adding an option to transfer a character between ships eventually, but for now there's no such option.
If the Western servers have a different update schedule than the Japanese servers, I'm still going to keep playing in the Japanese servers. SEGA of America already showed with PSO and PSU how bad they are at dealing with an online RPG. I wouldn't be surprised if the western servers would eventually start getting increasing delays in content update, and in some years they could even be shutdown prematurely (that is, without receing all content that was launched in the Japanese servers), like most PSO servers and the PSU PC/PS2 and XBox 360 servers.
I'll still make a character on the Western servers if the update schedules are different, but I'll play mostly in the Japanese servers.
It's basically like this, "fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you." (I played in the english PC/PS2 servers, which started with just a 2 months delay in updates and ended with a delay of over 1 year).