There are reports coming in that many Japanese retailers have stopped selling Apple products online out of respect for “Apple’s wishes”. The majority of the dropped products include iMacs and iPods from several large Japanese discount retail stores.

The only real evidence that Apple has actually asked these retailers to stop selling products online is a post made by Yodobashi Camera Company that claims they will stop selling Apple products online out of respect for Apple’s wishes. However, the company also noted it would be happy to continue selling Apple products through their brick and mortar retail stores. There have also been many other Japanese retailers pulling Apple products from their online stores.

So far Apple has no responded for comment on the reports and there are still many large Japanese retailers selling Apple products including Amazon Japan. Its quite obvious that other large retailers selling Apple products online is big competition for Apple’s online sales and could obviously start price wars for many of their most profitable product lines. This is why it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple has actually requested that these companies stop selling their products online.

[via TUAW]