|
Like most countries, there are computer users in
Japan who get into P2P sharing, trading movies and other files
over the Internet, although the number of users is much less
than in the U.S. and Europe. A far greater source of damage from
piracy here are unlicensed DVDs and music CDs which find their
way into the country from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Despite these
challenges, Japan remains a fairy tale land where producers have
the power to set the prices of their products artificially high.
For example, $30 is still the going price for nearly all music
CDs, and many movies sold here are priced well above what would
be acceptable in other countries (although Hollywood studios are
bringing their prices down here, finally). When I took my family
to see Star Wars last night, they had an interesting blurb to
raise awareness of pirated films, complete with a huge skull
that floats on the screen. "Movies are being stolen...the
emotion and excitement are being stolen. Pirated movies...I will
never watch them, I will never buy them."
All countries are unique and do different
things to words to make them easy to work with. In Japanese,
it's common for various words to be abbreviated and reduced, to
make them easier to say, especially English words which can be
cumbersome when rendered into the Japanese phonetic system. For
example, the Nintendo Entertainment System was sold here as the
Famicom, short for Family Computer; similarly, if you want to go
out to eat at a restaurant like Denny's or Coco's (the latter is
billed "The California Restaurant" here), just ask
where the nearest famires (family restaurant) is. Since words
that are hip with young people tend to get abbreviated the most
-- such as puri-kura (print club, e.g. those machines that print
your picture on little stickers), ge-sen (game center) and
sutaba (Starbuck's) -- I think this is largely a "twentysomething
and under" thing. Often companies will go out of their way
to get people to think of their products in these abbreviated
versions, advertising names as Pure-ste (Playstation) or Dora-Kue
(Dragon Quest) to make them more familiar to customers.
One thing you can say about Japanese boys:
they love beetles, especially stag beetles, dung beetles,
scarabs and the Japanese Great Kuwagata. Just as there are otaku
who live for anime and manga, there are "Kuwagata Baka"
(Fools for Beetles), who think about these bugs all the time and
reconfigure their homes with special heaters and humidifiers to
keep their insects alive through Japan's cold winter. My son
went through his beetle phase last year, begging us to buy him
two red-backed beetles from Malaysia (the male promptly killed
the female). One of his favorite shows on TV was one that
featured "insect wrestling," various beetles fighting
on camera, trying to push each other off a log. Now you can
enjoy these battles with the new NHK Kabuto Beetle vs Stag
Beetle that we've got in stock (region 2). It's very interesting
to watch these bugs duke it out!
|
