Dark-San
30th November 2006, 11:18 PM
Japanese animations series or better known as Anime is a rather popular fad in Japan. Where they have their own dedicated channels and they are widely available in every store. Their merchandises are always easy to get and cheaper to purchase too. While this is the truth for the citizens over at Japan, oversea fans of animes are not that lucky.
But rather they had to pay a much higher price to get their daily dosage. One thing for example would be a simple figurine for One Piece's Luffy. It measures no more taller than 15 centimeters and perhaps weighs even lesser than 40 grams. Local market would price around 40 bucks for the originals and around half the price for the duplicates. Whereas back in Japan, you can easily get it for under 10 bucks of the local currency. What is to be blame for this over hiked in price?
One reason that may come into play would be the shipping prices! Wouldn't this push the product to be higher by only a few dollars? So why the sudden 400 percent increase? This comes in the second reason, us! It may be a sad ignorant truth but it is a fact that the every reason that the price skyrocketed because of us, the anime fans.
We allowed the retailers and the wholesalers to exploit us while we continue to pay to them. We may feel indulged in the merchandise's quality and perhaps its specialty but it is still the sad truth that most of the anime fans continue purchase these products off these retailers.
One might say what about animes? Japanese citizens get to watch the latest season of Bleach and Naruto and still would be able to catch latest series like Soukou no Strain, Gundam Seeds Stargazer and much more. How about us, the foreign fans?
No, we don't get the latest episode until the distributor goes to Japan and get the rights from the producers there. And when everything is settled more or less, they will only show it only after a few years later. One example is happening right now over here in Singapore, the anime Inuyasha had already wrapped up the series like 3 years ago and we are still in the mist of showing episode 160. Makes no sense right?
So with such time lags where do we get our animes? Sadly we have to get them from fansubs that is considered an illegal nuisance to many distributors and production house?
In the past, fansubs are considered to be advertising tools for people from abroad to get to know of the Japanese culture. Now that animes had become such a big hit from local and foreign demands, the distributors wants to milk this cash cow. And to do that, they now have to axe these fansubbers out from the picture. And the same fansubbers that they had owed their success to during the early days.
And though there are still continual rant between two sides of the online community on the legalimate issues of fansubbers (http://fansub-faq.darkmirage.com/). But as long as this is not ironed out yet, members here would still have to refrain from posting an licensed materials over here in order to prevent legal actions to be taken against us.
Well, that’s all for my final advice to the anime fans out there. There is a few ways to beat the evil capitalism system out there. One way is to get duplicates of merchandise. Firstly a well craft duplicate looks no differences from the original except for that 'Made in Thailand' tag. Secondly if you keep insisting on getting the originals, get someone who frequently travels to the nation of the rising sun and get them to purchase these items for you. These are my best advice, if someone has a better one than they could share with the rest of the members here. ^.^"
But rather they had to pay a much higher price to get their daily dosage. One thing for example would be a simple figurine for One Piece's Luffy. It measures no more taller than 15 centimeters and perhaps weighs even lesser than 40 grams. Local market would price around 40 bucks for the originals and around half the price for the duplicates. Whereas back in Japan, you can easily get it for under 10 bucks of the local currency. What is to be blame for this over hiked in price?
One reason that may come into play would be the shipping prices! Wouldn't this push the product to be higher by only a few dollars? So why the sudden 400 percent increase? This comes in the second reason, us! It may be a sad ignorant truth but it is a fact that the every reason that the price skyrocketed because of us, the anime fans.
We allowed the retailers and the wholesalers to exploit us while we continue to pay to them. We may feel indulged in the merchandise's quality and perhaps its specialty but it is still the sad truth that most of the anime fans continue purchase these products off these retailers.
One might say what about animes? Japanese citizens get to watch the latest season of Bleach and Naruto and still would be able to catch latest series like Soukou no Strain, Gundam Seeds Stargazer and much more. How about us, the foreign fans?
No, we don't get the latest episode until the distributor goes to Japan and get the rights from the producers there. And when everything is settled more or less, they will only show it only after a few years later. One example is happening right now over here in Singapore, the anime Inuyasha had already wrapped up the series like 3 years ago and we are still in the mist of showing episode 160. Makes no sense right?
So with such time lags where do we get our animes? Sadly we have to get them from fansubs that is considered an illegal nuisance to many distributors and production house?
In the past, fansubs are considered to be advertising tools for people from abroad to get to know of the Japanese culture. Now that animes had become such a big hit from local and foreign demands, the distributors wants to milk this cash cow. And to do that, they now have to axe these fansubbers out from the picture. And the same fansubbers that they had owed their success to during the early days.
And though there are still continual rant between two sides of the online community on the legalimate issues of fansubbers (http://fansub-faq.darkmirage.com/). But as long as this is not ironed out yet, members here would still have to refrain from posting an licensed materials over here in order to prevent legal actions to be taken against us.
Well, that’s all for my final advice to the anime fans out there. There is a few ways to beat the evil capitalism system out there. One way is to get duplicates of merchandise. Firstly a well craft duplicate looks no differences from the original except for that 'Made in Thailand' tag. Secondly if you keep insisting on getting the originals, get someone who frequently travels to the nation of the rising sun and get them to purchase these items for you. These are my best advice, if someone has a better one than they could share with the rest of the members here. ^.^"