It’s just like my old neighborhood, except the pirate got arrested…

From ANN

Japanese Man Arrested for Selling Pirated Ghibli DVDs
Kazue Orita, a tutoring school manager in Eniwa City in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, was arrested this week on suspicion of selling pirated anime DVDs. The man allegedly sold unauthorized DVD copies of My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa – Castle in the Sky, and other Studio Ghibli movies through Internet auctions and other means. Officials said he sold a six-disc package of pirated DVDs, smuggled from China, for 7,500 yen (about US$65). He allegedly sold over 400 DVDs for 530,000 yen (US$4,600). Police are investigating the details of the smuggling methods used.

Selling pirated copies of studio Ghibli films in Japan is kinda like selling pirated Disney films here in the states, it’s sure to bite you in the ass…or is it? Oh yeah, there are all those guys on the street corners selling pirated videos and they never seem to get caught. Not only that they always seem to have all the newest cute Disney/Pixar films. You know? For the kids! Because kids will watch anything animated even it is clear it was filmed from the back of the theater and the sound sounds like it was recorded in barrel. Getting videos for your kids this way has to be entertaining too, since they will most likely grow up thinking you buy dvds off a blanket beside the local taco stand and not from BlockBuster.

Anyhow, I figure the quality of the pirated studio Ghibli dvds were slightly better than ones sold on the street corners but idea is the similar. Buy or print the dvds for dirt cheap then sell them to some poor sucker that either doesn’t have an internet connection or thought they were getting a deal on the real thing and make profit. Although, I can’t understand why a manager of a tutoring school risked jail times and/or heavy fines just to make a few bucks. Perhaps his daughter needed a new Prada bag or he needed to fix his expensive new luxury car that was recently wrecked on accident by an ex-biker turned young unorthodox teacher recently on staff at his school. The world may never know….

Author: Jeremy

Jeremy was first introduced to anime with heavily edited versions of Mazinger Z (aka Tranzor Z in the US), GoLion (aka Voltron) and Macross (aka Robotech) while growing up in the 1980's. Since then his tastes have evolved into a fairly eclectic mix of anime with a soft-spot for underdog shonen stories, psychological/cyber-punk stories and select love comedies. Jeremy was also the head organizer of Anime Souffle anime club in Los Angeles. It was at an Anime Souffle meeting where he met Michael Huang and eventually was invited to join as a guest co-host for Scattered Cells Podcast episode #6 in February of 2007. Afterwards he became an official part of the Anime Diet crew.