Good business sense is allowing your customers to buy from you.

I am taking up a kind offer from the master of this Blog whose issues with recent events in the anime world align with my own. I share a great many of their concerns with the state of the anime industry in the United Kingdom, but for reasons which will become apparent below have an even larger stake in the recent developments regarding Aniplex; thus I shall focus my post on this, more urgent issue.

I am a long time anime fan, originally from the United Kingdom and presently an expatriate on account of my employment. A few years ago I moved to a small country which cannot sustain its own anime (or indeed any sort of film distribution) industry. The only source of DVDs in the country is through import from France or Germany which, with western titles, is not a problem as they usually ship with English language audio and French/German subtitles so I can listen to the dialog in a tongue I understand. However anime recorded with Japanese audio and subtitled in French/German is unintelligible to me and I have no options for obtaining it locally produced.

Shortly after moving I found that UK shops could not handle delivering to me because of the inconvenience of the postal links to my new country making the cost not worth the effort for them. After a spectacular failure in delivery of a limited edition computer game when the courier simply returned the item to the shop, declining to complete the delivery, I realised that purchasing from my original "home country" was no longer a viable source of media either.

Fortunately America, with its better postal structure owing to it having a larger area inside its own borders, had no problem with delivering to me and I have been happily importing anime that I could understand these past few years while my "home region" steadfastly ignored me as a market.

I was overjoyed when Aniplex started releasing premium quality products for us and bought almost everything they released. I was an anime fan back in the days before the headlong rush to the bottom the current industry has embraced, and thus am far more pleased with my collection of "singles" series in their lavish artboxes with a wide selection of bonus material than I am with the current thinpack, bare minimum releases enforced by the ridiculously low price point that customers currently demand. The deluxe Kara no Kyokai box in particular was a pleasure, as I had thought the days of truly sumptuous artistic boxes were long gone. Having its box facing outwards on my shelves is a delight even when I am not enjoying the content of the discs.

The recent moves by AniplexUSA have left me in a very bad position. I have already purchased a large portion of their titles like Fate/Zero, Blue Exorcist and Madoka Magica and, under their embargo, will be unable to purchase the rest. Should I wish to see the end of these series, Aniplex seem to be saying that I should look towards my own domestic industry, which does not exist, or the industry in my "home country", which will not ship to me. Even were I still able to access the market of the United Kingdom, the domestic industry there is in such bad shape I cannot imagine that we would ever see anything as elegant as the Fate/Zero Part 2 BluRay box. We would be more likely to get the entire series crammed on 4 DVDs - or, worst case scenario, half the series released on BluRay and then promptly cancelled, forcing us to re-purchase the same content on DVD to maintain consistency across the series - but that is a subject which has already been addressed in another post on this site, and I do not see the benefit of rehashing the failures of Manga Entertainment over and above that. Aniplex as an Intellectual Property License Holding entity are telling me, a dedicated fan with a very large disposable income dedicated solely to my hobby of Japanese animation, that they would like me to stop purchasing anything from them. A decision which seems remarkably ill advised given the current declining state of the anime industry (as pertains to licensed income in regions other than Japan) in the face of competition from other, more mass market visual entertainment.

I believe that Aniplex, in enforcing their regional segregation, is trying to fight their licensees' battles for them. There shouldn't be an issue of cross importation if every region's licensee produces a superlative product. I pay a quite ludicrous overhead in postage and import taxes to purchase my anime from America, so I would be more than happy to cut my costs down to the price of a local region's off-the-shelf purchase, but only if the local release A) exists and B) is of comparable quality to the offering from other countries. If you allow customers to make their own decisions, they will reward the property owner with a purchase through one of the licensees. Aniplex as a whole will make a profit, and forcing your licensees to compete on quality will only improve the presentation of each individual offering, or allow natural selection to take its course as those who cannot compete die out. Propping up lazy licensees devalues the image of your product as a whole, as customers are exposed to your creative output through the distorted lens of sloppy reproduction processes.

To paraphrase the parlance of the modern generation, "Stop resisting, and take my money."