Westernisation: Good or Bad?

[Cyber_Skaarj]

So, because anime is full of Japanese costums in it, and I who live in the mid western USA, and have never studied more then I ever had to for school about Japan can't like or understand anime? That makes no sense.

Actually it makes perfect sense. When anime is dubbed and brought over to a western audience, they take out a lot of the references to Japanese culture and traditions, and replace a lot of that with western ones (Sailor Moon is one of the more very guilty ones in that respect). Then when someone becomes more than a casual fan of anime, and starts watching subbed stuff and reading properly translated manga, they start to immerse themselves in Japanese culture and slowly begin to understand it.

So really, it's only the more obsessive of fans that will begin to understand aspects of their favourite shows culture. And considering how few of the more obsessive fans there are compared to the rest of the population, then you can understand why shows and movies from other cultures won't be shown on mainstream TV for that country.

[Drawde]

So really, it's only the more obsessive of fans that will begin to understand aspects of their favourite shows culture. And considering how few of the more obsessive fans there are compared to the rest of the population, then you can understand why shows and movies from other cultures won't be shown on mainstream TV for that country.

Which is WHY there's so much localization. The companies bringing these over are trying to make money, so they try to appeal to as wide a market as possible. When anime and manga was first brought over, the thought was that almost no one WANTED to know about Japanese culture, so the stories were "westernized", and manga was flipped. It wasn't until relatively recently that fans started wanting things unchanged. Even then, the majority of the fans aren't going to read/watch a series if there's a novel-sized stack of explanations to go with it. Though it seems a lot of them don't mind some things needing to be explained.

[three headed dog]

Pluto watching star trek is very believable since there are around 5 million fans of star trek in japan. (Star trek was shown in 150 countries after all). http://archive.salon.com/feb97/21st/startrek970206.html