Fighting reverse importation is also a hard thing to do. It’s like a chain of unfortunate events, by the time you get to the point we are in, a lot of other things had to screw up first. But really, there’s no need to get upset when Japan decides to torpedo the BD release of Persona 4 anime by making it less appealing to the home-grown Japanese crew. What’s sad is how they made it less appealing to everyone. (Okay, except the potential dub-only crowd, a crowd that probably should DIAF.)

How do I explain it? You start with ANN’s licensing write up. The key concept to take note on is the Minimum Guarantee–that’s the bulk of the money anime licensors make on most titles. Some titles do okay and beat the MG, and US companies make that money back over time to a point in which the profit sharing kicks in. That’s when the situation becomes ideal. The details of these contracts, well, vary and I don’t know anything about the specific beyond what typically gets passed around.

The MG is generally pretty much pissant for majority of the late-night variety of anime. Let’s say it’s $25000. Now compare it with a best seller. For example, let’s say your profit Fate/Zero BD boxes  (just for example; that one sold really well so it’s probably not a good example but let me use a box set to simply the math) is 30% of MSRP (total MSRP for the 2 boxes is  75600 yen, so 30% of that is 22680 yen). If you lose 1000 units would-be sales (for a frame of reference, F/Z BD box #1 sold 43000 copies on the first week) from reverse importing that means you lose 22,680,000 yen or roughly a quarter of a million or 10 times of the MG. Well, great, the average late night anime sells at around the “Manabi” line, which is something like 4000 units. So that factor of 10 makes sense, right?

Of course, if you want to be the North American licensee of Fate/Zero you will be paying a lot more than $25000 for your MG. Of course, Persona 4 anime is not Fate/Zero. Or is it? P4 anime sold over 20000 BD on its first week. If we really just ballpark it and assume P4A cost roughly the same as F/Z (7600 *9 + 4000 = 72400 yen) and assume it will do half as well in Japan (disc 10 is not out yet) as Fate/Zero and it will only lose 500 units from reverse importation, at 30%, it comes to about 130k-140k.

Of course, we don’t know the extent of reverse importation (and, in addition, people who do not import the Japanese set because they prefer the domestic one) so I can only guess, but the numbers are very convincing. Let’s say if your average 1-cour collection R1 DVD yields something like $14 profit, that means in order to match $140,000, the domestic licensee has to sell through ten thousand copies to break even. I guess you can tweak the numbers here and there to make it look not as bad, but 10000 units generally is like, R1 bubble-era best seller level of sales.

Does it make sense to you now that nobody has licensed Fate/Zero? Unless you are Kaze, of course.

Does it make sense to you that P4 anime BD doesn’t have a dub? Only partly. There are other ways to fight reverse importation. But that this element exists and Japanese companies, who can do math as good or better than I can, want to fight it, seems to be a natural course of action once you take a closer look.

One last kicker: Shawn K. mentioned roughly 500 units of Kara no Kyoukai BD box sold through Aniplex’s “official import” program. Think about it for a minute.

For more actual acts of reverse-importation, I wrote about this which is just more about how Clements blogged it on his Milky Crisis doohicky. And the reality is that like bootlegging (as opposed to internet piracy/file sharing sort of thing), people buying Infinite Stratos or P4 anime are just Japanese kids who probably aren’t buying the domestic release anyway even if they have the money to blow on it. There’s going to be a percentage distribution, where we can only reasonably claim a subset of total reverse imports as economic replacements. It certainly can be a matter of ethics–as in, a guilt-free way to “fight the system” and “support the creator” all the same. In other words, things that doesn’t really matter on the spreadsheet.

Because the math is pretty clear. It only takes a little bit of that substitution effect make all that MG money moot gravy. Japanese accountants just need enough to justify a 3-digit loss of sales!

Another angle to this is that P4 is an Aniplex title. How will Aniplex play its cards? Especially in light of their recent spat with Amazon? Seems to me that this move went down to the wire with Sentai, how it’s announced right after Otakon. I can’t say what works and what doesn’t, but such is the fate of popular otaku titles in Japan I guess. Clements pointed out the obvious and salient thing: a lot of this depends on the overall economic climate. With the way the yen is, the price gap between Japanese release and every other release is going to widen and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about that. It’s just another factor moving the wrong way on someone’s spreadsheet, another link in a chain of unfortunate circumstances.

The only saving grace is that I think P4 anime is going to be popular enough in America that the DVD sales will be okay to make it somewhat profitable. The price change on the BD seems like a concession on Aniplex’s part, too. Is that enough to convince the people who would have purchased P4 anime if it was DVD only but now won’t be because there’s a gimped BD? Time will tell.

One of the neat things about being a fan for a while (I’d say at least 6 years) is the opportunity to see your niche fandom evolve. When I was watching anime in the 90s, there was no such a thing as “slice-of-life” genre. In fact the term didn’t really come into its own until maybe the 2004-2006 period, when iyashikei shows were hitting the late-night airwaves in full force.

The relationship between kuuki-kei or iyashikei shows and slice-of-life seems almost too obvious. The placid everyday-ness of a lot of those shows inspires the use of terms that describes the everyday. I think I might have liked it more if “slice-of-life” was called “slice-of-everyday.” In fact, it might as well be called “slice-of-everyday-life.”

The evolution of fan lingo is not a big deal. I can deal with onions and cours as well as anyone. The problem I have with “slice-of-life” (henceforth SOL) is that it is ill-defined in the usual case. Or rather, it is only descriptive one-way. For example, I can say show X is a SOL show and we can think about how X maps to what we define as SOL as a genre or an attribute to a show. But I have a very hard time taking people’s recommendations for SOL shows. Besides the archetypal kuuki-kei stuff (Yokohama Shopping Log, Aria S1 and S2) you get shows like Hyouka or Manabi Straight in the mix. I’m like, please pass the crackpipe?

In other words, it makes sense as a tag on ANN or MAL, but it makes no sense as a topic for discussion. It’s just too vacuous. Moreover it is kind of a ghetto term. Nobody calls The Simpsons or Firefly a SOL show. Or for that matter just about any non-anime show out there. Why do anime fans use this term? It also propagates like an undead zombie, as I previously ranted on. Every time I run into someone using the term in a serious way I want to kill a kitten? Can we seriously switch to “healing” or “ambiance” as tags? Please?

I guess a more seasoned response to the SOL mapping problem is that anime fans historically have been horrible at mapping things. If I had a dollar every time someone calls Love Hina a shoujo story I would’ve been able to probably skip a mortgage payment, just for example. But that’s not a problem to me because those well-established terms have very clear definitions as applied to genre. My fundamental problem with SOL is that even if you know every single piece of information about a show, you still probably cannot firmly decide if a show is SOL. The best you could do is to convey a probability (probably a bell curve of sort, this would make an interesting experiment) that by saying this show is SOL when asked to name a SOL show, what % of people will agree with you. Because the bottom line is that SOL is a matter of more about feelings than any textbook definition. It’s like moe. Which explains why it is a good way to express the attributes of a show, but not a good way to prescribe a list of shows that shares a certain attribute. Perhaps that is enough for any language, but merely agreement is just superficial understanding, that “agree to disagree” sort of BS.

In a way, by coining this term, we have allowed ourselves to open up this construct for further discussion. Just what defines SOL for each person probably can fill the skies of internet boards and forums like how someone professes wifehood for his or her favorite character. It may be cause for celebration and it might be okay to cherish the process that goes on to explore the nature of the SOL, but how can we, on further examination, avoid this linguistic confusion between SOL and, say, kuuki-kei? Or perhaps in a more mercenary sense, will the term SOL ever graduate from common use, beyond as a parameter in the greater database that marks the likes of TVTropes or ANN? It seems to be stuck as a short hand, rather than a discussion topic. Probably precisely because the idea behind “slice-of-life” is bogus when rigorously applied to a genre (and many other things). And I will probably keep ranting about this until I stop running into people using this term in a functional, non-ironic way regarding attributes of anime series.

Or maybe I should approach it the other way around: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES IS SLICE OF LIFE YO.

[Think of this post as an updated version of the same rant I posted in August, 2010, which is now partly recovered.]

It’s not important how we got here, but Mike Toole pointed out how it is about three times the price to purchase all of Madoka on Blu-ray, versus how much it cost in the UK. Eventually he asked a more general question about how people feel about reverse importing:

Twitter anime nerds: do you think it’s immoral or otherwise dodgy to import cheaper legit DVD/BD from outside of your local region?

I guess here is my 2c, and it comes down to two ways to look at it.

For the longest time I have lived like an international citizen. I still do. Sure, I was growing up in America but I was also an immigrant. Invariably my access to anime was a little wider than the average American in that I could consume Chinese-subbed/dubbed stuff (I used to have these Canto dubs of MKR somewhere, they’re hilarious). The fact that I could be okay with importing a Korean or Taiwanese release and tough it out is no different than importing the Japanese release and tough it out. I guess I actually never imported from Korea, but I did do the other two. Especially Japan.

The last things I imported from another English-speaking region were the two Studio Ghibli films that are now finally coming over to the US–Ocean Waves and Omoide Poroporo. Well, I probably should pick up the JP release of Ocean Waves because that’s Blu and what I have is the UK DVD. But in this day and age, for someone so steeped in fandom online, region locks are akin to a minor inconvenience in terms of doing what I want to do.

I think anime is invariably something of an international product. It still amazes me how some Americans consumes it so out of context of its international origin, cultural background, and the context of how and why the shows they’re watching were first created. To me that there’s an international market for this crap is as natural as why Mexicans want to work in the States. I think that analogy is actually kind of what I want to get at.

Except unlike illegal immigration, region locking and such is simply the perpetration of a boorish business model predicated in a pre-global economy state of mind. It’s not about sovereign rights or anything like that. There is nothing natural about this; or rather,  it’s a human effort to do something unnatural. Moreover I don’t think natural or not matters at all. It’s just a matter of enforcement and doing what is probably the rationally best option.

I said region segmentation is boorish because I kind of read this. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but faced with a new reality of the 21st century as the billions of people in Asia and South America arm themselves with social media, cheap-yet-powerful personal computing devices, wireless broadband, and wealth/spare time, this is just how things will go. Emerging economies gonna emerge, yo. Who are we to say they shouldn’t? It’s certainly the ethical thing to do in my opinion, that we let people buy the stuff as long as it’s legal and isn’t going to hurt anyone. Finally, copyright is ultimately a tool for merchants to make money; why use copyright in a way where that isn’t going to make you more money? And it’s ethical?

The other way to look at it is the practical take. I import from Japan, so when I buy something that way it is a very conscious decision. Take Nadesico for example. I thank Nozomi for not putting out a Blu-ray of Nadesico because I have no choice but to buy that standing collection of Nadesico Blu-ray discs (including the new telecine transfer for the movie). If they had released the same content in a box set oversea and sold it for $200, I would have purchased it in a heartbeat because that is about $150 less than how much I paid, plus it reduces certain amount of hassle.

But if I could’ve gotten the same import from the UK at $200 instead (for example), I probably would have–assuming it’s a similar product, including the video/audio quality, packaging, etc–and feel nothing about it. That’s the reality of the situation. In a similar way I feel this is how a lot of Japanese fans feel about importing anime from America (hello, Infinite Stratos).

The irony of me thanking Nozomi, hopefully, is not all lost on you. The truth I have some major doubt that anyone in American can produce the sort of quality box set that rivals your average premium Blu-ray disc box that Japan sells to their hardcore otaku buyers. Did you ever look inside the Kara no Kyoukai box and touched its interiors? Did you ever look at the bitrate on these discs? Transfers and upscaling aside,  Japan just does it better in this category, almost across the board, every time. And for a big spender that sense of value is worth that much extra dough. For a show very dear to me I am more than happy to splurge (when I can) on it to get the proverbial best possible treatment. Nozomi just gave me the reason to spurn them and make this an easy choice.

I think the choice is a lot more serious in the Fate/Zero case. The first Blu-ray box sold at Rightstuf over the cost of importing from Amazon Japan. In that case, do you import? I hounded the Fandompost/AOD forums for a while during those months and found that there are some people who would pay the extra $40 or whatever and support RS. There are also people who think encouraging people to do it at RS sends Aniplex a signal. That may all be true. There is also a compelling reason to do business with RS because they do provide customer service that rivals Amazon, and they can go the extra mile in the case with product recalls and the like, something you are going to be SOL with if you deal with a Japanese exporter.

But you know what? I don’t give much mind to that. I don’t buy something with expectation that I will have to deal with the customer service. That’s just me though. What was more convincing was when I went to the Ei Aoki and Kondo autograph session at AX, they asked me if I got my Rakkyo box at Rightstuf.

The reality continues. I think if you read Clements’ interview I linked earlier, he links to another anecdote about a certain UK release that got reverse-imported. It’s just how that game works, so I understand if the market is set up this way, and people will reverse import, it will lead to the production companies avoiding releases that make them lose money this way. If they can show they’re losing money this way (I think this is a very valid question that nobody has gave me any concrete evidence as to what the answers are).

That’s basically what I mean by consequences. If we’re okay with the Kadokawas and Nozomis of the world, as far as these reverse-import situations goes, then I guess everything is peachy. And to a degree they are victims, as are their customers, of this wretched system that we have in place to extract short-term value at the cost of long-term growth.