Mar 24 2008
Kinokuniya LOVES their Narutards (and other Mainstreamers)!
Ok as most of you know I DO blog Naruto, but I’m at a point of “well I came this far, too late to turn back now” rather than “I FUCKING LOVE NARUTO!1111!” Now that I got that disclaimer out of the way….let me begin by saying I’m fucking sick of Kinokuniya lol. Ok at first I was really happy that like they moved close to where I work and I could buy manga by the hoarde. But as the months went by, their selection of manga or even merchandise became more and more geared towards the idiots I described at Anime Boston. So today I go in to pick up Shugo Chara Volume 6 which in Japan was released last Wednesday. Typically Kinokuniya stays on top of things and has manga releases air mailed to them. But when I saw that it wasn’t there and inquired at the cash register…the guy tells me “Unless its a popular manga like Naruto, we don’t ship it airmail.”
So let me get this straight. Unless its a popular mainstream manga, geared towards ENGLISH speakers, it won’t get airmailed. Let’s read that again….only JAPANESE language mainstream manga gets shipped to America….which will probably NOT be purchased by English speakers because they can just as easily pick up the latest English release. Where is the sense in this??? Why do I have to wait a month for Shugo Chara to get here just because it’s not “popular”. And what does he mean by popular anyway? Popular in America or popular in Japan? I’m not one to speak of popularity here, but Shugo Chara is in my top 10 search results in google analytics! 
So after that I just left. I’m getting kinda tired of this. This crap happens every time. Because of this they basically lost at least $20 off me because I didn’t want to keep asking them where a book that was released months ago was…I just went online and read the scans. And with the dollar being worth less than 100 yen, I have no intention to shop online and pay the outrageous shipping prices.
The worst part is not only do they ship popular manga (Naruto, Bleach, etc.) to Kinokuniya fast, they ship LOADS of it. So you have like 20 volumes of the most recent Naruto on the shelves, while you only have like 2 volumes of Shugo Chara, 1 and 3, neither of which are even remotely new or complete.
It used to be that Kinokuniya always had the most recent books on the shelf, and for old stuff I’d go to Book Off and Asahiya. Now Kinokuniya only seems to have old shit (I mean they have a shelf dedicated to Sailormoon for crying out loud) or new mainstream crap…which Mainstreamers aren’t going to buy anyway because they’re too busy acting like idiotic teenagers to bother learning Japanese well enough to read them. (Saying Onegai Sensei by the way doesn’t count. 
)
Needless to say, I can definitely see myself visiting BookOff more often…to sell old manga because I don’t intend to continue or buy new ones. I used to hate reading scans on my computer (cause let’s face it you can’t take manga with you to the toilet) but with the way that the US is now actually starting to cater to all the anime teentards, downloading raws in bulk is looking brighter by the day.
Maybe one of these days I’ll do a follow up to this about how I can’t relate to anime fans in the US anymore…or you can just read my post on Anime Boston.
P.S. The source of my rage really comes from the fact that some idiot got half of the Anime Boston attendees sick, including both me and JP…so here I am running to kino with a painfully sore throat and getting this kind of shit only increases the disappointment.
Tags: disappointment, fangirl rage, manga rant
24 Responses to “Kinokuniya LOVES their Narutards (and other Mainstreamers)!”
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Di Gi Kazune on 
shirokiryuu on 
marmot on 
L-chan on 
Kona on 
Naruto has by far the worst total enjoyment:minutes ratio I can think of. It’s hardly like narutards have few options of what anime to watch, there’s plenty of it that’s interesting, free, clearly subtitled and not insulting to human intelligence but they watch it because they are told that the japanese are cool people and this is what all of them watch. It really makes you want to strangle them with their own headbands.
That’s shitty.I mean god how could he give you such a selfish reply?”Popular manga”Yeah yeah..Well now that got me really furious..
But..did i get it right?”You will not post any Shugo Chara from now on?No..You were my only source of SC!Please
yoyo> If I can download a raw volume, I may post about it….but I don’t see myself coming back and buying it anytime soon.
marmot> Ironically enough at Anime Boston, Death Note is like the new Naruto..but since the Death Note manga ended in Japan, he had to tell me the next best thing
My kino is better. Then again, Japan is closer here. >_> Then again, most of my stuff I order in one go so that I save the courier charges.
(cause let’s face it you can’t take manga with you to the toilet)…..
Did you really have to paint this image while I’m eating?
Moving on, I understand it from a business point of view. You sell what sales. Period. My local (English Lang.) bookstore refuses to stock Ah My Goddess; but you can get Naruto from the first volume to the latest. Always in and overstocked. And they fly off the shelves. Bleach as well. I believe you’ll be able to add Code Geass to the list after Cartoon Network/Adult Swim begin to broadcast it.
You must realize this is America, and American taste rules. You’re a far more advance weaboo than most. Like that chick that kept trying to out Japanese you during that contest. She is light years ahead of the people stores are stocking for.
But you’re rants are always entertaining & colorful. Ever thought about working for Fox News?
Sorry about you & your fiance’s illnesses. Drink something warm, pop some Tylenol, and find some soothing lozenges. And try not to reinfect each other.
You can’t take a laptop with you to the toilet?
Kinokuniya is a business, so it will do whatever sells. But support the artists and order the volumes online!
Doesn’t Kinokuniya have Japanese customers who want the manga? I mean, the store has been there a long time and sold to Japanese people in NY long before all the Narutards showed up.
Just to play devils advocate for a moment (and, no, not the pinball machine), but given that Shugo Chara is published in the States now as well, you’d probably be just about the only one looking for the series in Japanese. It’s Japanese audience is niche. Naruto, even discounting all the weeaboos buying it despite being unable to read it, has a considerable audience among the Japanese speaking audience. Like DS says, there’ll be Japanese people wanting Naruto.
Yeah, it sucks, but that’s life, unfortunately. Hell, I can only dream of the kind of availability of manga and anime (in any language) that you have in the US - I’ve got to buy pretty much fricken everything online.
I didn’t think the Japanese liked Naruto that much…I mean at least I go by what’s popular on NicoNico and right now people wanna spin leeks to Illevan Polka or shake their butts to CaramellDansen rather than yell out RASENGAN!
I refuse to buy online though…as I said thanks to America’s shitty economy, manga will now cost me like twice what it used to if I get it online.
Wow, that just plain sucks. God, what is wrong with people?
And I know what you mean with Naruto, honestly, I’m not even watching the show anymore, I’m keeping up with the manga solely because I used to care so much, and I just want to see it through to the conclusion. (Masashi Kishimoto is SERIOUSLY fucking up his own damn manga, the only way to redeem it at this point would be to kill Sasuke off, which isn’t gonna happen….god damn it)
Online popularity is deceptive in any part of the world. Not everyone uses the Internet, and not everyone visits the kind of geeky sites we do.
Naruto does still sell really, really well in Japan if the weekly sales charts I’ve seen are any indication. To be honest, with it being a Jump manga, if it didn’t sell well they’d have killed the series off by now. The magazine is pretty harsh on under performing titles.
Digi> you’re telling me. I heard Nougami Neuro is set to end next spring cause it’s losing popularity
Business is Business. >_> I agree with you and what the others have mentioned.
I waited about a month (I’m sure it was longer…) for the 4th and 5th volumes of Shugo Chara (other mangas as well) and it was last week that they (Kinokuniya) finally had it. I wasn’t going to buy it, but Amu was tempting me.
Book Off is a good friend. (Though it’s always hot upstairs.)
Hope you feel better.
Jump isn’t that ruthless… I mean Muddy lasted 12 whole chapters! Anyways, whenever I go to the local (English) bookstore, the manga section is full of people reading Naruto, and little kids running around with like 3 books of it begging mommy to buy it, so even as the teenagers move on to Death Note (which I can’t stand) the kiddies are probably keeping sales robust. I would guess that little Japanese kids in the US are reading the manga corresponding to whatever is showing on TV in the US, which is probably why they’re buying Naruto.
This is why I’m a One Piece fan. I used to like Naruto (I still watch old episodes, like 1-100, online now and then), but One Piece has kept up its standard of high quality storytelling. And more than anything else, Eiichiro Oda knows how to USE his characters, rather than just cast them off when he’s done with them. (seriously, he brings back old characters you’ve forgotten about all the time, and if they don’t fit in the main story he gives them their own side stories in the front-page mini-serials) Unlike Kishimoto who seems to have forgotten that side characters need development too.
But I digress. I think that being an anime fan has become increasingly annoying and difficult for us older fans. No, we’re not old old in that we remember the good old days of Speed Racer, but we rode the first wave along with DBZ, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warriors. We remember when anime was just scarce enough to make it rare, yet available enough to feed our insatiable appetites. We learned a certain amount of appreciation for what was anime and what was available (remember when Media Blasters was like, at the top of recent series?)
But the most recent “generation” of anime fans are increasingly young and annoying, and seem to only care about what’s “cool”, and god forbid it’s not foreign-looking enough (one reason Naruto outranks OP in popularity here in the US, but OP beats Naruto’s ass in sales in Japan).
Man, now I’m missing the good old days of subtitled VHS. (oh Magic Knight Rayearth, where art thou?)
haha I had KareKano fansubs on VHS but I tossed them out once JP moved in and brought his licensed US DVDs
ah the good ol’ days…
…i think it’s gonna get to a point where I won’t even care if I don’t buy manga anymore…soon after I’ll stop watching anime and this blog will go lol. oh noes!
Honestly I do not know what to say … it reminds me how the “Xbox generation” pissed me off as a gamer, maybe its a generation conflict since I am not going into “the good old days” were better because I remember games that were awful in the old days, it just the only thing that seem to progress in gaming is graphics.
I am not going to say that about Anime since I enjoyed “Guardian of the Sacred Spirit” … “Gunbuster”, not so much … manga is likely the same (there is good and there is bad).
I thought Neuro was gonna die a natural death with the author actually having an ending instead of making it a neverending story.
I wish I had a Kinokuniya in the first place.
The English language releases of manga here are pretty diverse (relatively speaking) so I’m at least kinda glad that there aren’t any places with like, half the stuff being naruto.
America is still bringing up Anime in a slow but steady pace. Possibly when more Anime becomes recognized they could possibly bring other series in more easily. Or We could just move to Japan.
I guess its always like that. I always see the shelves of manga stores well stocked with popular manga like Naruto and Bleach but only a few copies of less well-known manga titles.
i wanna know what the shugo chara volume 6 looks like. cause in every volume, she is holding the volume number with her fingers. XD
lol if the guy on the pic sees this he’d use his rasengan on you! haha yeah ur right that guy looks so ridiculous…
[quote]Ok as most of you know I DO blog Naruto, but I’m at a point of “well I came this far, too late to turn back now” rather than “I FUCKING LOVE NARUTO!1111!”[/quote]
How very true for most people… What happened to all the great ninja awesomeness back in the Chuunin exam arc!!!
haha, that picture is epic
I think Naruto is quite popular for japanese kids, not the teen and adult ones tho, they like moe more