This tweet of an e-mail from CDJapan has been floating around this morning, stating that they’ve been asked to stop sending Avex Pictures-related material to their foreign customers. I got this e-mail as well, for what it’s worth.

This isn’t actually entirely new a situation – Amazon JP have actually been quietly cancelling a number of Avex pre-orders for the last few weeks. I know a few who have had their copies of the surprisingly great Scorching Ping Pong Girls recently cancelled out from under them, for example. This kind of just makes the situation here rather more clear, given that Amazon used to have a habit of over-reaching some of their shipping exclusions whenever someone published game-soft out-of-character in the past. This is actually deliberate rather than an accident for once.

As a part-time WUGner, and someone who has a habit of import PriPara CDs, it’s rather a frustrating situation, with both of those properties being under the Avex umbrella. It’s also pretty weird given that they’ve been things like WUG events in Taiwan in recent months.

Avex have a lot of pokers in a lot of fires, though, which makes speculation as to what exactly is going on here somewhat fruitless. The price disparity between Japan and the rest of the world when it comes to the video media does tend to make me wonder if it’s something to do with near-neighbour territory music licensing moves, though it could just as well be about foreign market exploitation of PriPara or other children’s cartoon properties.

It’s kind of an annoying situation all around, though.

I mean, it’s a perfectly nice image of Diana – the beginning of an effects shot even – but then some jerk goes and gets a nice frame of Akko and Lotte and I start pondering my lack of luck with these random pack-in things.

But, hey, I didn’t even realise this was coming with a genga until yesterday morning, so I probably shouldn’t complain, and at least it’s not Candle Tier.
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Mostly because I’ve yet to reach my two-post-a-week quotient, but also because I’m always kind of curious as to how Japanese disks with English subtitles turn out, particularly when there’s no stream or western disk for them to pull subtitles off, as is the case with the recently released first volumes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Code Geass:Akito the Exiled.
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The first home-release volume of Kawamoris latest sci-fi classic, AKB0048, was unleashed upon Japan… well, it was last month at this point. I literally just got my shipping notice for volume 2 today, but my volume 1 was waiting upon the latest Precure movie and K-On! before shipping, meaning I only got ahold of it yesterday. Let me tell you, as sweet as K-On! is as a show, more than any other disk media release I own the LE would make a pretty great blunt weapon. It’s got some serious heft behind it, and you could do someone some serious damage with properly (or improperly) wielded.

Anyway, to steer back towards point, the first episode of AKB is presented on BD in it’s directors cut form!
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That’s six “9”‘s then. I suppose I could say it’s over (point) 9000, but that would also result in me having to apologize with great immediacy for inflicting such a terrible joke upon you all.

This is the last of the Japanese DVD releases for the second season of Haruhi, which was actually released about a month ago now, but I’ve been sitting on it for the simple reason that I sat on the previous months volume for over a month as well, and there’s nothing quite like a bit of consistency. Anyway, since it seems like a befitting thing to do for the final volume, I guess I’ll reiterate to context for the whole thing.
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