Over the past 7 years, there has been a massive growth of interest in Japanese media as Western media seems to be in a chaotic free-fall. While Japanese Manga has swelled in sales and popularity, American comics are on full-blown life-support. As the fandom for Japanese entertainment has exploded, many localizers have seen this as an opportunity to take beloved Manga, Anime, and Games and use them as vehicles to push their own ideology onto fans of these mediums. According to a new statement by Bandai Namco, the problem of Western localizers messing with Japanese content is about to get much worse.
One of the first examples of this to gain attention and go viral was the complete altering of dialogue within the series Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. Disgraced voice actress Jaime Marchi took it upon herself to alter a casual conversation within the show to include complaints about the Patriarchy. This was heavily out of place; it did not fit with the character saying the line, and while some attempted to defend the change, it’s largely seen as a massive negative when watching the English dubbed version of the show.
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However, since then, anime fans have seen a multitude of examples of lines being changed within Anime, and not just Dubbed versions. The actual English subs have also changed the dialogue to change the meanings of character interactions and generally to push a more Western/Progressive view of the world. Even if this meant it went against the original intent of the author, as the years have gone by, it’s become abundantly clear that to localizers, the ‘message’ supersedes all.
When fans of the source material first started to notice these arbitrary changes driven by ideological reasons, companies attempted, in good faith, to address what had been occurring. However, industry professionals, from localizers to voice actors to directors, immediately went to personal character attacks against fans instead. Instead of addressing fan concerns, they seeded a narrative that the only people complaining were either Misogynists, Racists, Transphobic, Homophobic, or Bigoted. It is a tired trope of those in Western entertainment to defend themselves from good-faith criticism.
While localizers injecting woke politics originally seemed to be contained within Anime spheres, it soon became apparent that even Manga localizers had begun to change/alter the text to remove the author’s original artistic vision. One of the most prominent examples concerns a character named Yamato in One Piece. Yamato is a woman, as stated by the author himself, and the cannon source materials released to accommodate the Manga. However, Western localizers heavily changed the text/dialogue within the Manga to imply Yamato is a trans man. Because they’ve altered the official English translations in the Manga, Anime fans of the series have been heavily deceived into believing this character is now officially trans.
With the subversive tactics of localizers within Anime and Manga, what about the final piece of Japanese entertainment regularly consumed by us Westerners, video games? This entertainment medium arguably has the worst influence on localizers in its sphere.
In May 2023, NIS America, which is the official western localizer of Japanese company Nippon Ichi Software, is doing a live stream of one of their releases, as shown in the tweet below.
Bandai Namco then issued their statement, saying, “We tell them that the cleavage is a bit too exposed, or the skirt is a bit too short. Before, they weren’t very flexible, but they’ve become more proactive on such subjects.”
This marks a sea change where game developers are now openly stating that they had made changes to things their localizers were uncomfortable with, including Japanese Humor, which they view as being sexist. This is fundamentally changing the artistic vision of the product, as shown in the cover art for their latest release of Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless. It seems to be that showing any amount of cleavage also offends the delicate sensibilities of their localization team.
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To make matters worse, in a recent article by The Japan Times representatives for Bandai Namco confirmed that they have been directly going to the studios in Japan and outright lying to them about what is and isn’t desired by Western audiences. They’ve been telling them that the majority of sales for large titles are outside of Japan, and if they don’t want to fall behind, they need to drastically alter their original artistic vision for their products.
As Japanese Entertainment has exploded, Western entertainment is having a slow and agonizing death. The absolute collapse of American comics, the shuttering of major studios, massive layoffs that just decimated Microsoft Gaming, and the objective trash fire shows and films that seem determined to burn as much money as humanly possible. In truth, Japanese entertainment has gained such massive popularity in no small part because people have desperately been seeking alternatives to Western entertainment. So, taking the absolute worst of Western entertainment and forcing it into Japanese entertainment will obviously lead to the same failures.
And while no localizers have managed to alter the actual animation of the series so far, X users who began spreading the NISAmerica stream again also started to re-share another tweet, which was a reply to the first post. In it, a localizer known as Katrina talked about how since westerners have no ability to see the original version of the Japanese script, game localizers can be even more ‘creative’ in how they make their changes since, seemingly, their audiences will be none the wiser.
Katrina also talks about how they can contact Japanese developers directly, urging them to change visuals to better suit ‘our culture’. What does she mean by our culture? Katrina, likely, is referring to progressive ideology, which barely represents 8% of the US population. This is important given that the US market is the largest for game releases, with a revenue of $54.9 billion in 2022.
Why lie and try to convince Japanese studios to make these changes knowing that it is only liked by a small fragment of the population? Why convince these studios to jeopardize their revenue? Do they not care if their actions lead to even more layoffs? And why haven’t the Japanese studios refused to go along with these absurd demands?
One studio tried, and it shows just how much coordination there is in forcing these changes onto studios. In 2020, they were forced to announce they would be canceling the release of their game to Xbox. The reason? Microsoft’s main competitor, PlayStation. PlayStation demanded the game be censored for the Western release, and the studio refused because this was a remaster, and it needed to be true to the original and true to the fans of the series. Not long after this, Xbox suddenly became apprehensive about releasing the game, and the developers unfortunately had to announce the cancellation.
The message is clear to these developers. They either heavily censor and heavily change their artistic vision and their cultural product, or Western studios will work together to destroy their game’s release. There is no amount of failure or suffering that is too much for these people to inflict on others in the name of advancing their own dogmatic views. For Japanese entertainment, it may already be too late now that they have such influence over Japanese developers.
What do you think of Western Localizers tampering with anime, manga, and video games? Leave a comment and let us know.
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This is why Japanese hired AI to do a better job than these Cancel Pigs
Cultural authoritarians can suck my dick.
Cancel Pigs need to GTFO here!
It’s time these Communist pigs lose their jobs as “localizers” and be replaced with AI.
May all like Katrina be broke and destitute.