Jan 09, 2017

Grabbing a Manga I actually wanted to read

I was reading Khatz’s post on overcoming burnout and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually spent time finding stuff to read that I really wanted to read. Honestly, manga has never been my thing. It’s always been anime, but there have been times I wanted to read a manga to continue a series that ended a bit too soon. Well I remembered what I wanted to read in Japanese. 氷菓 is one of my favourite shows. I say favourite because it’s in the special list of shows I actually re-watch. It’s pretty unusual for me to do that. Some other shows on that list that come to mind are are Cowboy Bebop and Overlord. No matter how many times I watch them, there always seems to be something appealing in re-watching them.

I recall a grad student from my undergrad days mentioning that there’s a final volume of 冰果 that never quite made it to anime land, and it’s available (or perhaps was at the time) only in Japanese. He mused about someday learning the language just to read it. I felt his pain, back then before I realized that learning a language is stupid-easy if you take your time and focus on building fun learning habits. Oh, if only I’d started at that very moment, I would be fluent right now. But I didn’t. So I’m not. And here I am on memory lane.

Anyway, I don’t have a whole lot of textual stimulation in my immersion environment right now. More than half a year in and still very little in the way of reading material. Well, better late than never. Time to start.

Since I’m pirate scum, I started by tracking down an uploaded version of the first volume. Haven’t managed to find the rest, so I’m biting the bullet and importing all 10 volumes. First time importing anything for myself. Ever. Thanks アマゾン!

In the process of tracking these down, I’ve learned that imports can be very expensive. Like really expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. I tried a lot of sites dedicated to imports, but all of them paled in comparison to going to a native version of Amazon and doing international shipping. The US version of Amazon didn’t quite have all of it, and most of what it did have was at an outrageous price. Some of it was priced well but had obnoxious delivery schedules since they were all 3rd party sellers. Alibaba didn’t have the manga (just body pillows… ew). JBox did not have it. YesAsia had almost all of it, but again too pricey; each issue was priced separately.

In the end アマゾン ended up being the most cost effective and expedient. They are delivering it the same week I ordered it. Man, shipping within my own country tends to take longer than that!

It really goes to show just how much these dedicated import sites can rip us off. Most people are happy paying a little extra for the convenience of not having to deal with being literate in Japanese, but if you’re learning through immersion like I am, that’s sorta missing the point. You don’t get better at reading websites in Japanese by not looking at websites in Japanese. Even if you need a little Google translate magic here and there, it’s a valuable learning experience.