Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Is Anime Still Region Locked?
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Usagi-kun
 Posts: 877 Location: Nashville, TN |
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Yeah, my problem was trying to navigate the site in Japanese, particularly with third party sellers. Your US Prime does indeed transfer, but this is really helpful for beginners, at least when it was originally posted (I noticed that has been recently updated, so cool.) My tablet now will do the language transfer automatically, but I still needed to know the kanji for 'used' and 'new' conditions. I also used the steps to set up amazon.it (Italy), so take it however you need. Proxy shipping services are another great option, but I thought this was a good way to start and with Prime is even easier. |
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luffypirate
 Posts: 3187 |
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I’ve got this great player that is completely region free. It’s a Seiki brand Blu-ray player with 4K upconversion, product SR4KP1. Found it for less than $60. I’d definitely recommend it! So nice to be able to play my R2 DVDs on an actual television.
Some US fans don’t mind the price. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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Most Sentai Blurays do, and by extension any Australian or UK releases that they’ve authored. This was actually what they used to avoid locked subtitles for longer than Funimation did. Unfortunatelt, they were eventually forced to use those as well. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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In general, the reason is because our home video releases of Hollywood movies are priced between US$20 to US$30 when they're first released, and TV show season sets are between US$30 and US$50. As a result, we Americans see that as the price standard, and that is what a typical American budgets if they want to get something on home video. In addition, if you go to Walmart or somesuch, there will be a whole pile of older and/or less popular movies priced as low as US$5, placed in a cylindrical bin about a meter and a half tall and two meters in diameter. One result is that home video collections in the United States tend to be very large. I am not an avid collector and even I have well over 300 discs and videotapes of various things. A man who lives in my neighborhood IS an avid collector and has literally thousands of movies on home video (including laserdisc, as that was when he started collecting). I take it collections in countries where home video is more expensive are much smaller, as you have to be more selective in what you want to get, rather than just buying these on a whim. |
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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Personally, I've long since paid for software to be able to rip my DVDs and Blu-rays, and I always watch stuff on my computer, so region-locking doesn't really affect me in practice, much as I hate that it exists. Honestly, I think that the fact the DRM exists is a far bigger problem, but both systems harm folks who actually pay for the products and generally don't affect pirates.
Still, I have mixed feelings about the whole region-locking thing. On the one hand, it's definitely stupid that you can't just play DVDs or Blu-rays from anywhere. On the other hand, in theory, not having region-locking would make it far easier for folks to buy stuff from other parts of the world rather than their local market, which could harm the ability of the local licensor to make money and thus would potentially make it so that there is no local licensor, which would be a big problem. Still, I question that that is actually a real problem in practice in most cases. The cost of shipping usually makes the cost of importing stuff prohibitive. The price difference needs to be pretty significant for it to be worth importing a product from overseas over buying the local version (either that, or the overseas version has to be superior to the local one in some way). In the case of Japan, their prices actually are a lot higher than elsewhere, so I can totally believe that it's a problem there, but I seriously question that in the vast majority of cases, it makes sense for someone someplace like the UK or Australia to order stuff from the US (or vice versa) when the product is available locally (not based purely on price anyway). As such, I would expect that in most cases, the cost of importing stuff would make it possible for companies to retain their regions even without region-locking. Regardless, the fact that the trend is towards trying to use technology to restrict stuff and then make it illegal to get around the restrictions - even if you paid for the product - is sickening. I dream of the day that legislation like the DCMA is destroyed, but sadly, that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. 
If you're using chrome, you can tell it to translate the page for you, which can help. But even with another browser like firefox, you can always copy-paste the text to translate.google.com and get a rough translation. It's not perfect, but I've found that it's usually plenty to figure out what I need to know. I don't recall ever reading a guide about how to navigate amazon.co.jp or thinking that I needed one. The main problem I generally have is finding stuff, because it usually wants the names in Kanji, but either searching on other sites like cdjapan.co.jp and then copy-pasting the ISBN or finding the kanji name of the show on wikipedia will generally get me there, even if it's a bit more of a pain. And you can also just buy stuff elsewhere (e.g. at cdjapan.co.jp, yesasia.com, or play-asia.com). Whether that makes the most sense price-wise is another matter, but it's always an option. My experience is that in general, cdjapan is best for books, yesasia is best for CDs, and amazon is best for DVDs/Blu-rays, but it varies. And there are other sites out there, many of which are fully in English. Certainly, I don't think that assuming that amazon is the best choice is necessarily going to result in the best prices. Frequently, it comes down to what the shipping costs are. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum from sites that are fully in English are sites that are fully in Japanese such as toranoana.jp. I find those sites to be far harder to deal with than amazon.co.jp, even with google translate, and in the case of toranoana, I did have to find a buying guide online to figure out how to deal with it correctly, since it's not simply a matter of figuring out what you're buying and putting it in your cart. At least with amazon.co.jp, the checkout process is all in English, making it so that the only major problems are finding what you want to buy (given the need to use Kanji for that in many cases), and figuring out how to buy stuff that they won't ship outside of Japan. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6275 |
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....Which has a shaky track record when it comes to region free devices as Nintendo will attest to. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Not entirely true. For a long time CRT televisions could only do one or the other, but in the mid-to-late 90s it was certainly possible to buy one that could do both. The first TV I bought for myself back in 1996 could, which didn't matter to me when I bought it but I was later thankful for when I discovered anime.
Again, for a long time they could only do one or the other, but many players later in the format's life (at least in PAL territories, I don't think it was really a thing in NTSC territories) could at least play both. Usually they'd output what was called "PAL-60"; leaving the framerate/refresh rate alone but converting the colour signal to PAL. This was also common with game consoles in the early 2000s. Generally you had to have a pretty modern TV for that to work. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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If they were available in the United States, they were not easy to find. My father was a big fan of television in general (admittedly, it's a big part of why my home video collection is so large) and would not compromise on quality for his TVs or the stuff he'd attach to them. If he could find a TV that could play both PAL and NTSC, I'm certain he would've obtained one to put in the living room. |
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Shaterri
Posts: 173 |
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One exception to this is digital music; Amazon Japan 'region-locks' that and looks at your credit card billing address (if there is one) to determine what region you're in. There's a workaround for this, but it's more complicated: if you don't have a credit card associated with an account then Amazon Japan will use the 'mailing' address for the account to determine its region locking. This means that you can: (a) create a second account, giving it no credit card, but using a mailing address somewhere in Japan; since nothing is ever mailed there, what address you use is largely moot (I used Aniplex's offices just for the irony). (b) Buy digital Amazon Japan gift certificates from your main account (note that gift certs aren't region-locked), gifting them to the secondary account. (c) use the balance from the gift certificates to buy music on the secondary account. I've used this method in the past and can confirm that it works — it's a lot of hoops to jump through, but being able to 'legitimately' buy music is pretty worthwhile for me. |
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Naiera
 Posts: 42 Location: Denmark |
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Hardly any Japanese anime Blu-rays are region locked.
They are. The regular ol' Blu-rays that come with them might not be, but many companies have always released region-all Blu-rays from the start anyway. Actually, there's really no such thing as region "free" with Blu-ray. If a Blu-ray works in all regions it's because it's been programmed to work in regions A, B and C. There's no region zero. Discs can also be, for example, region A and B, of course, which is the case for many FUNimation releases.
It wasn't hard to find a PAL region VHS player/recorder that also played NTSC tapes back in the day.
This is something companies have adopted in the last few years, yes. It didn't happen early on, but maybe Japanese companies saw all the reverse imports show up on Amazon Japan and started to require forced subs for Japanese language tracks. Last edited by Naiera on Mon Jan 15, 2018 9:51 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4447 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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thats what i was wondering as well! they should be region free worldwide. regardless this region lock BS have been one of my big time pet peeves when it comes to any industry. and aniplex's japan branch is prime example of a company that is way out of control when it comes to this. I mean they COMPLETELY REGION LOCK THEIR OWN JAPAN YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!! if they were locking full eps of their products, that's one thing. but to also region lock trailers too as well as their entire channel? WAY OVER THE TOP!!!! i mean nintendo doesn't do that to their japaneese social sites,especially its pokemon channel which is shocking to say the least. nor does sony or even toei animation. its kinda dumb to have these region lock rules if you ask me cause in this day of age, people will find ways to get around them.
its actually the other way around. there are cases where they just don't allow that series to be licensed in the US AT ALL!! especially for the ero department where any ero series whether its and ero OVAs like kanojo x kanojo x kanojo or a VN like the school days/shiny days/cross days series gets licensed in the US, those versions are completely region locked due to the fact that not because its cheaper, those version are 100% uncensored since US censorships laws arent as strict and severe as Japan! fans in the old VHS/DVD days wouldn't bother getting the originals when they can just simply get the uncut US versions. i know it became a big pain in the asses for milky pictures which animated bible black & discipline zero as well as the company that animated kite & mezzo forte which is why newer companies like mary jane, PoRo , lilith/pixy/ziz ent and pink pineapple not only have never had any of their products licensed in the US, they completely region lock their DVDs. hell, i wouldnt be surprised that its the reason why type moon haven't released the ero version of their VN series. especially its fate stay night and hollow ataraxia visual novels which are the companies main cash cow in both countries but its ero versions aren't even licensed in the US let alone any of type moon's other products. and unless the japannese govt tone down the severity of their censorship laws, this will never change which means fans in the US will have to go to other channels aka watching ero OVA series via fansub websites cause in this day of age, people will find a way to get those region locked series online no matter how many times the change the region codes. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I suspect they weren't. Content originating in PAL territories but not getting an official release in NTSC territories wouldn't have been nearly as common as the other way around, and relatively few Americans would be interested enough in foreign content to care to get PAL-capable equipment. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3563 Location: Finland |
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Actually, US release of Shiny Days removed three routes because the characters were deemed too underage considering some of the countries it was marketed in(Canada, UK, Australia). However an (un)official restore patch was released a bit later that restored all cut content. (There's a bit of story behind but to put it shortly, as Jast couldn't officially release or endorse such patch, they labeled it 'unofficial' and it was released through avenues not affiliated with them...) |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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It's really too bad that American companies aren't more open to keeping the mosaics. Beyond artificially decreasing the available licensing pool, some of that stuff just does not look good with them removed.
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