The Nutbladder Ranking: 2010-04
April showered us with a lot of pretty cool new shows, characters, charm points, designs, songs, and whatever that gets you going. To be honest I can probably do more than 10 for a change, but that’s not the point of this exercise! Let’s go!
Spring-Summer CDJapan Links
Here is another edition of shameless link-sharing of the import media that I will buy/am buying/want to buy/bought…
But before we get started, I’ve been hearing a lot of good coming from HMV, mainly because according to those who use it, they offer an alternate means of getting first-press items and have better shipping prices. Plus, they are competitive like how Amazon.co.jp is when it comes to BD and DVDs, albeit with a catch. It makes sense why CDJ is getting more aggressive about their customer loyalty programs. And again, despite my obvious bias towards CDJ you really should just buy your stuff from wherever is best for you, however that it is. Just note the affiliate links below…
One thing new about CDJ is that they are carrying video games now. So far it’s just the usual line of console game titles, but you can preorder Love Plus+ already… It’s definitely an interesting move, especially since they are priced reasonably.
Ga-Rei Zero the Live: This DVD has the little show they put on a year ago. Suppose to come with bonus limited pressing item, but whatever. I think those of us who really liked the compilation vocal album from that show will probably appreciate this little act. I think it’s kind of a good thing that the Ga-Rei Zero BD box also will contain the BD version of this show. On the other hand it is kind of head-desk moment because it probably won’t come with the bonus items the DVD version has. But hey you probably can afford both if you can buy the BD Box.
Perhaps a much less obscure seiyuu event worth your attention is the K-ON live event last December. If you recall they announced season 2 at that show at Yokohama Arena, and so I hear a few of them played a little bit on stage. Now you can order it on BD and DVD.
Nausicaa on Blu-Ray is monumental, needless to say. But only if you care about Blu-Ray and a really, really decked out release.
KOTOKO’s Budokan live from this January comes out 7/7, same day as Nana Mizuki’s new album. The new Nana album is still untitled right now, but has a limited version and a normal version which is less a DVD.
FictionJunction has been on tour all over 2008 and 2009. There is a best-of music collection from their lives out in May. Yeah, this is probably worth getting. Sort of like trying to see Nanrietta at Animelo this year, but less painful on the wallet.
Speaking of more pain, the latest moe voice, now on preorder: Tatami ending and Arakawa opening. I’ve been listening to her (Etsuko Yakushimaru) band’s albums too, namely Hi-Fi Anatomia and Synchroniciteen.
Speaking of indie stuff, I still remember about those Aoi Tada indie albums I ran across last year at NYAF. It was so odd. But that made seeing her in Angel Beats’s music credit less odd. I guess she’s in cahoots with Lia by virtue of indie-labeling, which explains the double billing in the OP-ED single for Angel Beats.
Something more concurrent–I shouldn’t have to mention about K-ON!! ED and OP, but it is rare that I ponder favorably upon a Yukarin single–Oshiete A to Z packs a solid nostalgia punch to the face. Maybe watching B Gata H Kei helps (especially the OP), but it has just the right amount of cute and catchy.
While Marble is always cute and catchy to me, I have no idea what their new single is like. I guess I should find out, but, uh, do I like interactive game adaptation of weird fan interactive magazine manga thing? I would be able to answer that question if I knew what that is, besides it seems like some kind of harem but not really. You can read about Marriage Royale here.
More things I don’t know: who are “Marina” and “LiSA” that make up the actual people behind Girls Dead Monster and their Crow Song maxi-single? I guess they’ve done a live appearance last week. I think there’s something attention-catching in Alchemy that ended up me having pull the trigger on this CD. It’s the sort of thing I’d just iTune/Amazon MP3 for if it was possible…
Makkun – Renka Tairan: I think this post sums it up kinda. I am sort of slaved to collect every single under her name so anything that doesn’t suck is a A++ in my book.
I am not collecting every single thing from Maaya Sakamoto, although I do adore her stuff overall (and she gets a lot of playtime). Everywhere is a pretty sweet purchase on that note, as a best-of compilation. Just waiting on the news of her Budokan DVD now. Her re-printed back catalog is also tempting, so I’ve been stewing over that too.
A while ago I think people were talking about why Minori Chihara Meessage 03 DVD would be worth buying, as you can see some certain Malaysians in it. Similarly you can probably catch glimpses of my ugly butts in Kalafina’s latest album, if you get the DVD that comes with the limited edition. Yeah, see bloggers on DVDs. Woo. On second thought, no, don’t.
One of the best thing about White Album wasn’t the train wrecks, but the character songs. Especially the Aaya ones. In fact if you’re even half of a professed fan of the Dekobitch, you should be picking up the 2-disc OST of White Album. That’s not to mention the Nana Mizuki side of it. My only real lament is that there isn’t likely one SKU to rule them all, them being all the vocals from both sets of White Album anime and radio dramas.
I think that’s the bulk of it! Until the next time my wallet says uncle…
Open the Minorigate
I want to see if there is a rational basis in the action in which minori has taken in order to protect their operation in light of their recent announcement and run-in with fan translation operations of their visual novels. I guess first, a rehash of the basic facts.
minori is a Japanese game developer and IP house in which made the ef games, most notably. Their latest game eden* is not pornographic (rated Everyone), but their other games are. Nonetheless their games are fairly typical of modern reinvention of the visual novel genre, where the focus is story and not sex. During the RapeLay controversy and the subsequent rape game crackdown minori further made themselves outstanding to the non-Japanese galge fanbase by blocking all foreign IP from accessing their website. If I recall correctly their website is typical of other galge developer sites, so they aren’t hiding anything that you can’t find going to another developer’s site.
Fast forward to last week. A popular visual novel translation wiki broke out into an editing war. Later it was learned that the vandals were actually an agent of minori, and the subsections contested was about translating their games. A few days ago Minori posted a letter on their non-Japanese IP blocking portal that addressed the overall issue. Finally, you can read all about that here along with some thoughtful analysis and links to the edit war stuff.
Before people jump to conclusions (or after, w/e) there are some cold, hard facts to consider. Or rather, cold, hard recognition of ignorance, actually. There are some things we probably shouldn’t assume or conclude, simply because they are either things of speculation or runs contrary to conventional wisdom. And then there are some things that are pretty much factual.
First the legal issues. Overall they are not very relevant to the crux of the issue and I feel most of the time they’re just herrings to cover up something more goofy, but that’s the game people want to play…
One fact nobody brought up is that it is very unlikely minori can afford to sue anyone outside of Japan. Maybe Canada is cheaper, as it is where some parties to this controversy are located, but the typical intra-country US copyright infringement suit cost in the order of 20-100k USD, for one party, and that’s just to see a judge and maybe get some motions out there. I can only imagine how much more it costs someone who has no US presence to try to do this, who will have to get legal translators and hire foreign lawyers to do the dirty work.
[A little tangent and background--Funimation provides this service for their Japanese overlords, in order to lower the cost and help police the copyright of their works. But their business partners are the likes of Media Factory, Kadokawa, Bandai Visual, Aniplex, etc... These "masters" are on a totally different scale than any eroge makers, who all probably can enforce their rights overseas, even if it still hurts.]
Second, there is nothing criminal besides actual copyright violation, as in, distribution of a derivative work (translation). Of course if you are distributing the software itself, that’s obviously illegal, and so is distribution of the unauthorized translation. But if you didn’t distribute it, there’s nothing they could do (as in the cost of suit will easily surpass the potential recovery), plus you’ll have a very strong fair use defense.
These two issues are mostly speculative. Who knows, maybe someone can get some cheap lawyers. Who knows, maybe someone is loaded with $$$. Who knows, litigation can be a Russian roulette of sorts. But none of that is particularly relevant at the core issue.
Although minori raised these copyright issues, the most important legal issue they’ve raised is the condition of operation of their software based on a location restriction. That is no different than what is more commonly known as region coding. If Sony or Nintendo can get away with “we’ll sue you if you export our region coded games!” then they would have had; and for the record they couldn’t win suits like that. The law, as minori openly confessed their ignorance, is different once you leave Japan. And it isn’t even illegal or criminal to carry copies of their games outside of Japan (imagine you took your yacht to the middle of Pacific and installed ef on your laptop for a good time), so maybe they’re ignorant of their local laws too. Plus, the analysis of that kind of legal issues generally rubs up against consumer protection laws, and that definitely vary a lot from country to country.
[Aside #2: I'm making these claims based on the translation as I linked up there. So something could have gotten lost in the translation and I would be off. Legal arguments need a certain sort of precision after all.]
It’s hard to be sure if it is a breach of contract to export that sort of thing. I’m fairly certain it isn’t, but I doubt minori want to bring a civil suit in Japan against a non-Japanese person not living in Japan or otherwise have little to do with it, even if they could (which they probably can’t). Unless Japan is really whacked about their contract laws, I speculate that minori has actually zero legal grounds to make that particular argument.
The other big issue I have is that minori clearly illustrate a lack of understanding of the rating agency trap that the rest of the world do not live in. Japan is all about self-policing as far as industry behavior is concerned. America and the west? Not as much.
It might be fine that minori does not want to be a part of the growing problem that Japan has in the eyes of the international public as a peddler of sexualized images of children. In that sense it is okay to shut themselves out from non-Japanese eyes. However does minori even indemnify their local users against these sort of charges? If the Nonexistent Youth Bill were to ever pass, minori would be in the same boat as every other cultural exporters right along the lines with every anime publisher and adult game developers (dude, ef is srsbzns?). Is minori pulling this out of their collective buttocks? I can only speculate since this isn’t something that will likely to ever happen.
However, I think minori got the wrong idea about the foreign rating agencies. In Japan, the two rating agencies for adult games serve as a mean to self-police. In America, the likes of ESRB serves not to just facilitate the game industry to rate their games, but it is a way to serve the government bodies and retailers whose businesses is to appease the public. Regulation on content protects some publishers and retailers, who are the biggest fish in that lawsuit chain. Developers are nobodies generally speaking. In practice, the retailers basically set a standard that mirrors what a state or federal regulation would be (ie., card a customer for buying AO games), but without the fines that would be associated if this was already on the books. And just because ESRB coins a game as “adult only” it does very little to ward off legal troubles based on claims of child pornography, obscenity, and anything addressing the content. In other words, ESRB does not guarantee the developers very much. They certainly do not indemnify anything once the lawyers come marching in, because ultimately developers are free to do what they want, and bear the risk on their own. I guess minori is not up for that.
As far as I can tell, EOCS does not indemnify either; they just draw lines for publishers and developers to follow, as games that are not rated will not get sold by retailers, and the games that get rated are for sure the ones that could not get into trouble. This is fundamentally similar to the US model, except that a ton of unrated games still gets sold over the net in the US, and lawsuits against games are almost always ones that were rated. Americans don’t do that group think thing, we rock boats.
That’s all the legal stuff. The rest is just politics. The cynic in me says basically:
- Japan is beset with legislative threats to crack down on content industry for sexualizing children, for portrayal of sexual violence as a legitimate mean of entertainment.
- These threats cut into the creative freedom, cause “meiwaku.”
- These threats and pressure come from outside of the group, foreign or otherwise.
- So in order to make it go away, let’s keep this dirty stuff…more secret so they will leave us alone.
It’s that simple. Translations popularize minori’s games, so cutting off the translations will minimize spread of minori’s games, both as a matter of information and interest as well as to minimize the illegal spread of the software. That much is both rational and something we all can swallow. And minori is entitled to stick its head into the sand, and do even more by asking people to remove their fan translations. However they could have done that much more effectively without raising a ruckus with those loopy reasons that make no sense and hollow legal threats.
A part of me thinks even minori knows the nonsense it espouses are a loopy set of rationale. They just want to say something; and it isn’t so much they don’t want “us” to play “their” games, but they just can’t handle us. Unless you become “them.” Which in this case it means someone who can read Japanese and keeps this dirty little not-so-secret.
Just to set the record straight, the real people that all of us should be blaming are the Japanese bureaucrats who are doing their politico thing by preying on the eroge makers. If they did not have the public support, they would not have and could not have tried to pass these kinds of laws to curry favor with the local conservatives, bible thumping or not. It isn’t even the international organizations slamming Japan for its sexual deviancy, but those locals who do not stand up and protect their way of life. In some sense, minori is actually fighting the good fight by doing something concrete about it.
It’s just too bad that minori is doing it backwards by alienating their fans overseas. It doesn’t matter if you are the “good” kind of fans who would break the support disc and buy another copy and would heed every word coming out of minori’s geo-blocked web portal, or what mt-i calls dirty pirates. Know this: minori would rather cut you loose, and justify it with some weird reasons that may be completely unrealistic.
You know, for all the cries of “anime is dying” maybe we should talk about “eroge is dying.” That actually has some legitimacy to it.
Beating the Anime Horse, or Suggesting a Three-Prong Attack
Beating a dead horse is fun, that’s why people do it. It’s like stating the obvious. It’s easy to get it right, people will go “amen brother!” and you can enjoy your circle of reaffirmation of what you already ought to know. It’s why I’m writing this post.
Sometimes, stating the obvious is a good thing. But this? This is like, com’on, get with the program. Like, he might as well talk about moe if he wants to help the industry, to beat another popular dead horse. The Bang Zoom! rant is just that. I think if I was the CEO of some commercial operation whose profits in days past were founded on a commercial bubble which has now popped, I guess I would say the same thing? But like, I am just not sympathetic, and have a hard time trying to be.
During the height of the pokemon craze I’ve recalled people talking about “anime” as they know it being a possible fad that will come and go like other fads like it. Maybe comparing anime with hoola hoops or slap bracelets is something beyond my understanding of those things, but to imagine that to some, the comparison has a serious weightiness to it, makes me kind of sad.
I guess in the end of the day, it’s still about making a buck.
But what doesn’t make me sad is the cyclic and generational nature of anime. The big-spending anime fanbase, even in Japan, was sort of a volatile thing. One common way to smell an otaku is to see if they’re of a certain age and still living their lives around anime, manga, and games. That is to say most people who grow up with the stuff, in Japan, largely age out of it. It’s safe to say that far most Japanese males who grew up in the past 20 years have played video games and watched some kind of popular anime that isn’t just for kids. But people grow up, grow old, grow out of it. So it is not a stupid thing to do for anime and manga producers to chase trends, and they do.
I think the paradigm has to shift, for oversee licensees and marketing folks, to generate, capture, and ride the wave as people grow up with anime. Unlike troll dolls and tickle-me-Elmos, anime can change!
Generate: anime producers in Japan and abroad have to work together to target the kids of today. Kids meaning middle school and younger. Sure, it’s not easy to look for the next Pokemon or Yugioh, but the focus is on the demographic, and not the reach. It’s ok to go niche, although I don’t think that is really an option in America. And who knows, it’s possible that something actually creative (*gasp*) take shape and become a genuine fad. With video gaming so second-nature to today’s youth culture, that’s a great gateway for anime…perhaps. A big hit will more than pay for itself, but what I’m talking about is seeding, and you can do that with less.
Part of Pokemon’s success, I think it’s observable, is how Nintendo drove the market along with software and hardware sales. The anime IP was a tie-in; it wasn’t a big deal compared to the games but people loved it anyways. Those were big days of video gaming and the early days of the handheld revolution. On the flip side now that the revolution has already occurred, that sort of synergy might be harder to find, but who knows?
Also, there’s a similar thing with manga. Shoujo manga hits like Fruits Basket in particular… Maybe that boat has already left the harbor?
Capture: If we survey the generations of anime fans in the US, there is clearly a “Pokemon” generation in which Nintendo force fed a generation of kids ~10 years ago and some have become certified otaku types. That means as these kids get older, goes through higher education, and land jobs, it’s time to give them something to buy. In order to market to these true-blood newtype otaku, companies have to grow up along with them, and if they can’t diversify their products in that fashion, then they would have to expect a shrinking market accordingly. Unless they chase and create the next fads, which is what Japan does.
Ride: It’s great if you license Evangelion, which is a splendid gateway anime in of itself. It’s also great if you also license every anime that the otaku Evanglion had made would buy, because they will like you, your brand, and more importantly, give you money (ie., steady revenue stream) over the course of their otaku career. What’s more, you can help them to be better, stronger, smarter, well-educated otaku, but you can also make them into bigger spending otaku. You have to scale up in terms of not only the properties you license, but also in terms of the specification. Limited edition blu-ray sets? Figures? That sort of stuff. Sink deeper in those evil tendrils of otaku consumerism? Yeah, I guess that’s how it works.
This is how to train your dragon amirite. Oh, by “otaku” I mean it in the serious, “I spend nearly all my disposable income on anime/manga/game and I’m a recent grad with a steady job and maybe a mortgage” sort of otaku. Non-serious types are not addressed so much by this post (but making a living out of that market space is also important, sure).
House of Five Leaves Is Beautiful
…and ugly.
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