was the importing of Japanese media to the west a mistake?

[saltycoinsandmilk]

think about it

the two cultures are totally incompatible with one another, the languages are very different, and it's always really just been a niche thing that shouldn't be enjoyed by anyone bar a select few who are capable of analysing and understanding it.

anime, etc games, had to be heavily censored to even be at all accepted by the mainstream back then (most of those recommendation posts you see from newcomers on preddit are full of normalfags end up turning into replies from people who obviously watched 4Kids/etc dubs from the 1990s), and then as soon as censorship became a bit less worse than that*, it seems like those same normalfags go ballistic over 'oversexualisation' and whatnot.

* (in other words, a lot of the more 'niche' titles actually got brought over and given a release AT ALL. good luck on trying to market a fanservice-heavy title to Western audiences in the early 2000s, there'd have been an even bigger moral panic than now... truth is, it's been desensitised somewhat since then. being openly sexual is just not as shocking as it was 20 years ago.)

not to mention, those media were never, ever intended to be released outside Japan except those that intentionally went out of their way to pander to Western interests and values (which were almost zero anyways). only ever getting a North American release if they were thought to be commercially successful outside, and then often enough somewhat stripped down. however now it seems like quite a lot makes its way out here (excluding promo items, merch, etc) and as soon as that happened, people started co-opting that stuff because it became trendy/hip.

in other words, officially importing this stuff, was it always a mistake? should it have always remained untranslated and legally unavailable outside Japan? since all it seems to ever do is cause cultural clashing, media moral panics, and internal issues. oh, and localisation money/subsidiary funding could be better spent on producing games and whatnot.

 

[Taruby]

The Japanese media you're describing exists cause they imported and localised North American and European media, including media from the American and European underground scenes, which were enjoyed by many Japanese citizens, who in turn, created their own similar media and underground scenes. When those Japanese underground scenes in Japan grew and prospered, turning into a fashion craze among students even in respected schools and universities, their PTA and mass media lashed out against it heavily in their domestic moral panic, and it was largely thanks to North America and European support that such a backlash simmered down to the weird game creators have been dealing with for the last couple decades under 'Cool Japan'.

Asking if it were a mistake is the same as asking if automobiles were a mistake. Mistakes were made along the way, and there's things that could be done to improve automobiles in the future, but the invention of the automobile was not a mistake. Same goes for the mutual exportation and importation of media between cultures.

As Okada Toshio, one of the founders of Gainax, said in a recent video, 'Moe is Japan's strongest weapon'. You seem to be viewing Japanese media as a pure oasis that is being tainted by dirty foreign devils from the west, sullying it with their feces-ridden feet. When it's more like the Nazis from Indiana Jones cracking open the Ark of the Covenant; the bad guys scream whilst transitioning into bleached skeletons that explode into detritus, and the good people survive to live in a kinder, more gentle world.

If you're wealthy enough, you can try Patrick W. Galbraith's translation of Nagayama Kaoru's book 'Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanaga'. Amazon wants 147 USD for what would normally cost a Japanese bloke 946 JPY (about 8 USD). I don't think there's any books in English that bother to properly go into the history of eroticism in Japanese media and how it was regulated.

The more you read and learn, the more your statement of the two cultures being too different and incompatible is degraded.

 

[Narmy]

Yes, absolutely. Japan should go back to making their entertainment for the domestic market only.

 

[Hexasheep93]

Not really.

First of all from a free market point of view making the exporting of products illegal is not something I agree with.
Not to mention that it would not be feasable, the foreign market is very big at this point.

Secondly, Japan does make stuff for their own market. The issue here is that people who should not have any business in importing and adapting the work are the ones dictating the narrative in the west.

Localization has always been bad, at least in english, I think some other places did a better job with more faithfully translating the works

It is that part of the whole process that needs to be taken down and remade from the ground up. So we get a more true adaptation of the works

Once that is done then the public at large will be able to see the medium in its true form and decide whether they want to support it or not, ultimately getting rid of the trend hoppers and leaving only those that are actually interested in the medium.

So no I dont think Japan should stop exporting stuff. What they should do however is be more discerning and firm about the integrity of their work

 

[PhantomXero1x]

At this point honestly, we don't even deserve Japanese media because of how nasty the western fandom can really get.

 

[ジエントＰ]

Not really sure what you're trying to claim here. That Japanese media product should be sanctioned by the west? Then it will be the case like those products already sanctioned where I get it through some intermediary like kyrzystan or Kazakhstan then through the uae. I like to have original Language media for language learning purposes, such as the bible, kojiki and Kyoto school philosophy. If you mean the loocalizer works and non-fansub perverted official translations from the western branches of Japanese companies I could sympathize. I just don't really think it is a very good strategy to take the defensive in the culture. Instead I think Japan should disseminate propaganda on their way of thinking to the West, taking a core culture to extremity approach instead of the other way where they take the advice of Foreigners casually interested in Japan on what they should disseminate to the West. This approach helped Japan maintain one of the most widely accepted citizen passports around the world, but it really altered and distorted the perceptions of Japan just for the sake of likability and friendliness.
edit: by propaganda I mean the English conception of propaganda, any medium such as poster, word, art, music, etc. used to push a agenda or message that is able to be propagated or spread widely.

 

[localizersagainstthewall]

Yes, return to isolationism

 

[saltycoinsandmilk]

the trouble is that if one were to actually release this stuff as-is, without doctoring it to the point of unrecognisability for western audiences (or even worse, something like the Guilty Gear Bridget situation which ends up affecting both sides of the picture), we'll start seeing even more 'moral panic' retards jump around the place both left and right wing

also about the whole 'translations being specifically bad in English', that's true to some point. The vastly different syntax and grammatical structure, the consumerist culture of Western nations, the moral panic when it comes to moe culture (in particular prominence in Commonwealth countries), well it's virtually a disaster waiting to happen if you're not going to explicitly seek out the very best or do it in-house (and the latter could result in 'all your base are belong to us' moments, too, don't forget...) and that's gonna cost a lot.

I doubt also that the creators much of the time, even know what the hell's being done to their creations abroad. Not to mention that the zoomers for the most part are too thick to use torrents, an attitude which started in Latin America and spread everywhere else, much like shitty trap music

at this point since fansubbing is now ALSO affected by SJW virtue signalling troons, you might as well just run google translate on a .srt file and try to make head/tail of it. Everything's become a joke. (Literally the biggest rules of translation to another language is that the text should flow naturally in the other language, retain a similar 'tone' (when dealing with spoken word), and preserve the integrity of the original work as faithfully as possible.

The only scenario where I can think of a translation requiring some kind of editing from the original would be if some sort of joke or whatnot that is impossible to translate properly without completely losing its intended effect. There's a few different ways to go about this, best case is to either omit entirely or approximate it with something suitable and relevant to the surrounding text/dialogue/story/etc - if you're going to approximate something that way, at least make it fitting... )

 

[Hexasheep93]

Honestly if the idiots want screech at what they get. Thats their problem, in the end it would mean less idiots in the community.
It still is not reason enough to just stop all attempts to export the medium.

In its current state localization has completely dropped the ball so making it better should not be that hard.
I know there is some disagreement in to what would entail a good translation. Im personally of the opinion of keeping the original intent of the work as much as possible without "softening", inserting or changing the meaning or context.

As you said a 1 to 1 translation is very difficult to do properly due to the differences in language. Which is why I do not believe to be necessary.

Also, and I know Im on the minority here I still believe that fansubbing is the preferable option, yeah there are groups that are woke idiots but there are also groups that arent.

The main thing is that official subs ultimately answer to the their bosses and cannot deviate from whatever stupid outline they were given by sony or crunchyroll or whatever other company that wants to pander to the lowest common denominator

Fansubs dont have to deal with that

 

[saltycoinsandmilk]

Also, and I know Im on the minority here I still believe that fansubbing is the preferable option, yeah there are groups that are woke idiots but there are also groups that arent.

The main thing is that official subs ultimately answer to the their bosses and cannot deviate from whatever stupid outline they were given by sony or crunchyroll or whatever other company that wants to pander to the lowest common denominator

Fansubs dont have to deal with that

Really good point. The more the woke idiots keep digging their own grave, the more likely there will be a resurgence of good groups.

That and a lot of it indeed comes down to corporate troon cocksucking. Likelihood is that corporate/official translators that were holding 'official'/'authorative' positions at some point, were also some of the first to troon out and abuse their powers to indoctrinate kids and stain the original media (as well as control the media's narrative), when the expansion of anime distribution led to normies finally picking up on it in the 'streaming' age.

It still is not reason enough to just stop all attempts to export the medium.

I guess what I meant was that if a stream is pirated it doesn't give the original creator any revenue whatsoever. If enough people started boycotting official subs - rather than any real response happen on the ends of Crunchyroll/Funimation/whoever the fuck, they'd just simply refuse to release new material overseas due to a 'lack of interest/sales/demand' and cite declining statistics as the reason.

This might cut away at the surface level normies and troons that have infected everything that was adjacent to anime interests, not sure about "pre-Tumblr porn ban, post-GamerGate" ones (i.e. 2015-2018) that seem to have a lot of significance (glares at the game modding community). I guess when it comes to site administration/moderation, banning gender ideology from being promoted in a positive fashion - similarly to what Section 28 did in the UK back in the 1980s - would be the ideal way to go.

 

[saltycoinsandmilk]

I know there is some disagreement in to what would entail a good translation. Im personally of the opinion of keeping the original intent of the work as much as possible without "softening", inserting or changing the meaning or context.

You just summed it up right there.

Also, English dubbing seems to be the root cause of a lot of the problems, even before everything became woke. Scrap the English dubbing scene altogether, and you'd probably see a huge uptick in translation quality, as well as a near-extinction of the Commonwealth countries, Canada aside, from the anime community.

(It's hard enough getting words on paper to have the same context, let alone spoken words from a script, to have similar tones/feelings/mood/etc. - there's a reason nearly every dub just fails miserably. Special mention to Neptunia's for somehow managing not to suck for the most part aside from a few standout characters there...)