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by OSButler
3709 days ago
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Oh yes, I'm constantly clashing with unavailable/blocked Japanese content. Crunchyroll has quite a bit of non-anime content to offer, but it's still far from other country specific streaming sites. The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube. I'm not talking copyright infringing content, but music videos published on the official band/performer's channel and being viewable from within Japan only. Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store? One would assume that a music video is meant to promote the music sales, so why are so many of them blocked outside of Japan then? |
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Yeah, they have a drama-only section that even then is 80% Korean (nothing wrong with that, just I'm not personally studying Korean.) And no option to turn off the English subtitles unless I want to watch movies on my computer instead of my TV. And absolutely, definitely, 100% never any offer for Japanese subtitles (closed captioning.) Very, very rare even on Netflix Japan, but it helps so much when I can find them.
> The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube.
Yeah ... I don't understand that at all. Of all the countries, Japan seems to have the most obscenely strict copyright takedown enforcements of all. I pretty much always have to resort to torrents to obtain songs even remotely popular.
Japan really is a country that's stuck in the '90s. No surprise that also includes their views on music.
> Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store?
I'm surprised they even let you buy it on iTunes. Apple must be forcing their hand somehow.
I've always dealt with extreme aversion to selling to me. The Japanese famously hate selling their wares internationally. It's pretty much a given that anything on Yahoo! Japan will be from sellers that refuse to ship internationally, so you have to use deputy services and pay them an extra 30% markup (plus a predatory and unfair yen exchange rate that's off by 15+ yen from the real market value.) And even then, there are sellers that track deputy IDs and will delete deputy bids. I've even come across one such seller, and my deputy of choice used one of their 'hidden' IDs to pick it up anyway. They're so used to it that they already had sleeper accounts for dealing with such sellers, despite having 100% perfect payment histories to sellers.
There are several major doujinshi websites for buying from artists, and these sites are 100% perfectly capable of accepting Visa cards from anywhere in the world ("it's everywhere you want to be... unless you want to be in Japan"), yet they block you anyway.
It was only just very recently that Amazon finally started selling new Japanese games internationally. Before then, I was paying 50% markups to small, sleazy extortionist companies. On top of having to buy Japanese systems to get around their region blocking attempts. Half surprised the fuckers don't try to use GPS to pinpoint you're not actually in Japan while playing their precious games.
Apologies if I seem bitter... it's because I am. I probably wasted $2000 on deputy fees alone trying to build a game collection and buy other items I like. And the harder I try to practice and learn this language, the more I get taken for a ride.