The fall of OneManga and the exchange of incendiary remarks between Sankaku Complex users and 2ch denizens continues, with the latest thread showing 2ch taking particular umbrage at such reported comments as “TV is free so manga should be free too!”
The latest exchange of fire was provoked by a Japanese news article highlighting the negative reaction of international fans to the closures:
“It’s weird that you have to pay for hamburgers when TV is free. McDonald’s should provide free hamburgers!”
“Writing manga and novels is tough. Just what do the guys saying ‘make it free’ think of the value of other people’s work?”
“Tell it to the publishers in your own country first!”
“Is TV free overseas?”
“In Japan it’s free too. What the hell are you talking about?”
“If TV is supposed to be free then please show me all those American movies and dramas for free too.”
“They’re pretty shameless even for a pack of beggars and thieves. If there are no official releases then get a company to import for you. If you can’t afford it then work.”
“Having to pay is weird. You pay every month for Internet. Make manga, music, anime and western movies free!”
“If you move to the system where ISPs have to pay money to a copyright association…”
“TV is free only because of advertising… think about it.”
“There are some like this in Japan too, but overseas otaku are just totally greedy and avaricious. You can’t make much of a market of their ilk.
They keep going on about making net contents free like it’s some great idea, but you just can’t make back your costs like this.”
“A question – how many millions of users did this site have? Will sales of manga increase without it? Or will they decrease without the publicity?”
“Who can say? They can either take the publicity or stop it for sales – in this case they chose to stop it.”
“A lot of the defenders were using that kind of sophistry to justify themselves. Not so much now though.”
“Without the site they have no way of knowing the manga at all, so it won’t sell in any case.”
“It seems if the anime is broadcast locally the manga sales tend to do well.
It seems that with people reading the manga for free and watching anime illegally, there’s no money in it so broadcasters drop it and as a result it continues not selling.”
“The attendance for events certainly went up, but at the same time sales were actually going down.”
“If they crackdown now their sales will only decrease even further…”
“What about the price difference between the US and Japan? Dragonball costs like $17.99?”
“America has price competition so you can get Dragonball for like $12 on Amazon. In Japan the same volume costs ¥980, so it’s actually about the same.”
“Considering the cost of translation, typesetting and distribution, $17.99 is not unreasonable.”
“Japanese publishers are idiots, aren’t they? Just making it all-you-can-read for $5-$10 a month would have probably worked nicely.”
“Really, Japanese publishers should be joining together to launch a single ‘free’ site to draw in all their fans and make money from that.”
“So TV is free? Then let’s have American comics distributed free as well?”
“TV is free? Where? You can’t watch anime for free anywhere on Japanese TV.”
“If you let our manga out of the country human rights groups overseas will just start complaining. Japan is weak to foreign pressure, so it ends up affecting domestic sales in Japan as well.
Just what merit is there to letting people who refuse to pay money read our manga?”
“They just want mangaka to work for their benefit for free. Try working for free yourselves before lecturing others.”
“Just getting rid of the cheapskates who won’t pay won’t harm the publishers at all.”
“Remember when some foreign pirates illegally downloaded an eroge and then their worthless media was all over it saying it should be banned? [See here & here] Not only do these bastards think they have a right to get everything for free, they also think they have the right to criticise us!”
“Some anime tried free distribution, delayed a week after the Japanese airing. They still complained about it being late and the subs not being good enough, saying fansubs were still better – honestly I don’t think you can work with these people at all.”
“At least buy the manga you worthless beggars.”
“I get the impression they could just release an ‘English version for foreigners resident in Japan’ – they might well get a lot of overseas orders…”
“I’m a copyright holder. Honestly if you’re going to end up with it being watched by foreigners like this, especially creepy Chinese and Koreans, don’t turn it into an anime at all. These guys will never pay for anything, they deserve to be treated like maggots.
The same goes for whites and blacks like this. They should all be sued into oblivion, the Japanese like this too!”
“yooooooooo
YOOOOOOOOOO”“They need to completely ban all subs in English and Chinese – they’re all just translating the English version into the other languages so getting rid of it will help.”
“What do you expect from the American masses? It seems most of them can barely tell Japan and China apart.”
“Foreigners = pirates.”
Actually, I live here and I can say for sure that there aren’t many pirates in Japan. People buy what they like because there are so many anime-related shops nowadays.
And don’t take the 2ch comments seriously. 2ch is a place where idiots who have nothing to do go and bitch about their sad lives. If you read the post and thought the otakus here are angry at foreigners, you’re wrong. 2channellers are looked down upon in Japan, did you know that?
AndI guess it can’t be helped that there are more pirates overseas… And yes it’s because Japan doesn’t sell their stuff to foreigners (not directly, at least). And no they won’t be able to in the near future, either. Why? Because Japan will get complaints from those who get offended easily by manga/anime/games. I wonder if any of you guys know about the censorship problem here. The publishers get tonnes of complaints from both Western and other Asian countries about “offensive material”, and right now there’s the government’s thinking about implementing this retarded law that bannes sexual content, explicit violence, etc in manga and anime. The Japanese areN7t willing to sell their stuff overseas because they’re afraid of getting complaints like, “OMG THAT IS CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!” “ZOMG THE JAPANESE ARE SOO PERVERTED HOW COULD THEY SELL ERO FIGURINES LIKE THAT?!”
Studio Ghibli is an exemption because they don’t have any dodgy material.
So yeah… anyway what i really wanted to say was, most Japanese aren’t racist.
And whoever said otakus are fat, you’re wrong. I know an American friend whos an otaku and he’s thin as heck. Plus most japanese otakus are skinny because they’re not interested in eating and they barely ever exercise lol.
Pirates can not afford to buy a product because the price is too expensive. While the price of these goods become expensive because of additional costs due to piracy.
You like to debate between the chicken or the egg that comes out first.
Y’know, one issue I’ve found with the whole manga market in the English-speaking world is the method of distribution.
Over in Japan, you have weekly and monthly comic anthologies. Jump, Ace, Dengeki, etc., all of these can be found on the newsstands and bought with cash money, meaning kids can work odd jobs or save their allowances for the latest issue and go buy it on their own after school. This allows lots of exposure to many different manga authors and their work, but more importantly, it allows the target demographic to remain centered on the 8-14 crowd.
It’s different overseas. In America, Jump is the only manga anthology that shows up on the newsstands. Nearly all manga are thus purchased as full tankoubon, doing which requires either a trip to a brick-and-mortar bookstore or an online purchase.
Problem 1: Most bookstore chains choose locations that make it problematic to reach them by foot. This means that the prospective buyer has to either commute by bus or drive there themselves. If they’re under 16, they can’t legally drive, and it’s not safe for kids to take the bus in most cities unless they ride with their parents.
Problem 2: Buying online requires a credit card, which can’t be gotten legally in the USA until age 18. This means the parent would have to approve the purchase and use their own money to buy the manga for their kids.
In both cases, this either forces the demographic of buyers above the 16-year-old mark, or brings the kids’ parents/guardians into the equation. This, in turn, means a lot more parental involvement in what their kids are reading and buying, and I think there’s a good majority of parents in the English-speaking world who would balk at buying their 13-year-old son a volume of ToLOVEru featuring Lala’s bare tits.
It also skews the demographics and narrows the buying field a bit, as in the West – just as it is in Japan – most boys give up on reading comics once they hit high school age, so a lot of the over-14 crowd (who would have the purchasing power) simply are not interested in reading manga.
Also factor in that a lot of manga is expensive – sometimes prohibitively so – in the English-speaking world, and you’ve got even more problems.
I like the $10-$25/month unlimited online reading suggestion from that 2ch user. The industry really should jump on that idea; they banded together to take down OneManga, why not band together for the sake of getting their foot into a market full of potential? There are tons of World of Warcraft addicts perfectly willing to pony up that kind of cash every month for the same old s♥♥t, day after day. Why not push manga at them?
IDK why japanese people are complaining and calling foreigners pirates, when they come to our country they are the foreigners. they shouldnt say hurtful things like that to others, instead of saying all those xenophobic things on 2chan, they should go an d make babie, if not then in a few years there’ll be more “foreigners” who will be willing to take care of their women. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I’ll admit that Americans illegally get their media for free more than they should, but…
Come on, you’re really gonna tell me Japanese people don’t do this kind of crap too? Has Japan really set itself back to where they believe all foreigners to be “black sails”, and that everything about their way of life is pure? (a familiar attitude they insult Americans for, might I add)
Come on people, do we really have to automatically steriotype? Let’s be buddies! No? Alright, f♥♥k you then.