A year after buying its Japanese subsidiary Salesforce Japan, and stating its intentions to grow operations in what is already its second largest market,  Salesforce.com has opened a new data center in the country.

The Tokyo data center, housed in an NTT Communications’ facility, will be used to support the growth of Salesforce.com’s social enterprise services for Japanese and Asia Pacific customers.

Salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff said demand for such services has been growing across the region, and by working with NTT the company has been able to offer services with a reduced carbon footprint.

“Salesforce.com continues to expand its infrastructure to support the adoption of the social enterprise among our rapidly growing global customer base,” Benioff said.

In June last year Benioff blogged about Japan’s acceptance of cloud computing.

“We’ve found that the Japanese love cloud computing because it gives them great software that is eco-friendly, democratic for all businesses, and upgrade-free,” Benioff said.

“One of the things that captivated my attention in Japan was how utterly swept the country is with social networking—there is a Japanese Facebook Imperative. Japan is already one of Twitter’s largest markets, and local social vendors like Mixi (a Japanese social networking website) are pervasive. Japanese customers have easily and rapidly adopted social networking as it is highly compatible with their community-based culture.

“Japan, more than any other country, is ready to accelerate with social networking.”

Japan first announced it was working with NTT to build its data center in October last year.

Since then it has been heavily pitching its social services, including Salesforce Chatter, Heroku for building social and mobile applications and Radian6, its social media monitoring and engagement service bought through an acquisition in March for US326m as well as its wider cloud offerings.

Just this month it held its Cloudforce event in Japan, which looked at bringing the social enterprise revolution into the business using Salesforce.com’s cloud services.