Import Goods

For several years being into Japanese Anime and Culture, one thing about the American Market is access to certain titles are restricted or off limits. With Amazon of Japan, there are plenty of titles available but yet, if you buy the DVD's and have them shipped from Japan to the United States. Now the problem when you put the DVD into the player is the player comes up with a nice message that it cannot play it because of the wrong Region Code. To get around the Region Code problem, please do a Google Search on ways to work around it. Also some links in this article of small companies sell Region Free players.

In addition to buying import anime, there are some good live action movies. A few that I have is the famous Battle Royale. Be forwarned that the violence is very graphical. Another couple of Live Movies I have are Waterboys and Swing Girls which are suitable for minors and are very funny. Those two movies are by the same director, Shinobu Yaguchi( 矢口史靖 ).

Now the question running in your mind is where can I get this ? There are several sources. One of them is JList and its PG-13 site of JBox. This site also has Region Free players for sale as well. The Proprieter of the site, Peter Payne, an American married to a Japanese ( 日本人 -nihonjin ) living in Japan ( 日本 -Nippon ). On his site, he sells not only import anime but also various other items such as Japanese Language ( 日本語 -nihongo ) aids, computer accessories, toys. Another site is CD Japan where you can but CD's and DVD's. The last place is Yes Asia which sells DVD's and CD's but also other items as well. They are based out of Hong Kong. To go off tangent a little bit, there is a site that has a lot of links to other sites concerning Japan, anime, manga is Danny Choo, a British Expatriate living in Japan. He has very interesting articles.

Now on playing the DVD's, there are other ways to play them besides buying the player. Personally, I use Linux as an operating system on my computers. There are a couple of DVD players you can use. One of them is Xine and another one is Ogle. The nice thing about these players is they don't enforce the region code lock. When I was in New Zealand a few years ago, I went to some stores and found some anime that was not available in the USA but they are yet on a different Region Code (4) versus Japan (2) or USA/Canada (1). With the Linux DVD players, I can play any DVD that I want regardless of the Region Code.

There is one other thing I want to cover real quickly is the coming of Blue-Ray DVD's. Not only do they hold more information compared to DVD's but also they do their Region Codes different. The good part is North America and Japan share the same Region Code. Personal opinion, Region Codes are a form of fraud imposed on the masses by ignorant and greedy movie executives.

Now on my personal experience with the various items I talked about in the article. On JList/JBox, I have bought many items not only things like anime (Freedom series) but I also bought Elecom mice for computers. On the mice, they don't use the traditional Red LED but instead use an infared LED. I bought movies from CD Japan and items from Yes Asia.