Forum - View topicSTORY IDEA: Best places to live for an anime fan (outside Japan)
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Brent Allison
 Posts: 2444 Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA |
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After reading a BBC listicle on "best places to retire", I thought to myself, "It's all well and good to head to cheaper warm places like Panama and Thailand after getting the gold watch, but what about anime fans? Are there some locales that are better for them to live in to socialize with other fans and enjoy shopping and social activities that suit them better?"
Living within a train ride to Akihabara pulls in a contingent of more adventurous anime fans who aren't native Japanese speakers, but these people represent a very tiny slice of Anglophone fans around the world. So my interest is in Anglophone societies outside of Japan that are, for lack of a better term, "anime fan friendly". Possible dimensions that may assist in ranking locations may include: 1) Number and size of anime clubs and other organizations, including those on and off-campus 2) Number and size of anime and anime-related conventions 3) Number and size of Japanese culture-related organizations (including specific organizations related to the Japanese language, art forms, and study of Japanese society) 4) Geographic sources of social media mentions of anime (e.g. which cities tweet more about anime than others?) 5) Number of shops where anime and anime-related goods are sold #3 might be the weakest suggestion since there are many anime fans who care very little about Japanese culture apart from anime. However, it is not uncommon for anime fans to add another dimension of Japanese culture to their list of hobbies, or even for people who were interested in something else Japan-related to take an interest in anime. Japanese culture organizations could be a meeting point for potential and current anime fans. For #5, I realize that anime fans are now generally more accustomed to purchasing goods online or at anime conventions, but shops like these also serve as face-to-face meeting spots for fans. This contributes to anime fan social activities. Speaking as a US-ian, it makes intuitive sense for cities on the West Coast as well as New York and Chicago to rank higher on a list like this. Still, there may be other cities that would surprise us. Perhaps places like Santa Fe, Atlanta, Minneapolis, or Nashville (as just random examples) have a vibrant scene that isn't widely known? Has ANN considered doing a story like this? I get this sense that articles ranking cities for "best at doing X" or "best places for X" are popular, so having one such list for cities where anime fans can feel more at home in counties where English is an official or otherwise widely-spoken language seems to make sense. Or are fans generally content to live where they are now, travel to the occasional convention, and keep most of their fannish interaction online, thereby making a list like this irrelevant? |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
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Flower Mound, Texas (and how did Funimation ever end up there in the 1st place?!)
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getchman
 Space CowboyPosts: 9120 Location: Bedford, NH |
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Gen Fukunaga lives in the area |
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nobahn
Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
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^
Yeah, but that just begs the question: Just how the hell did he end up there?! |
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getchman
Space Cowboy Posts: 9120 Location: Bedford, NH |
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good question. not sure exactly how convincing a coworker to sell his family feed mill in Decatur, Texas and invest in a production company leads to the establishment of said production company 50 miles away in Flower Mound, Texas
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9835 Location: Virginia |
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Flower Mound sounds like the middle of nowhere, but it is a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth city state. Basically localizing anime in Dallas is a lot more fun than running a feed mill in rural Texas.
I will bet that if the research is done, for the US at least, the answer will be a west coast city, most likely San Francisco. I doubt being in the vicinity of either Funimation or Sentai is likely to be of much help to a fan. Unless of course the fan is also an aspiring voice actor. I don't think they give out studio tours or free samples. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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For manga fan, the answer is definitely Quebec (Canada), assuming you are bilingual (as are most people in Quebec).
English North America, and France are the two largest manga markets outside of Japan. Unsurprisingly, the tastes of French and American fans aren't quite identical, so there are a lot of titles that are unlicensed in one market, but licensed in the other. In Quebec, we can buy French manga in our French bookstores, and English Manga in our English bookstores. Due to PAL/NTSC as well as region encoding issues, the anime market is no where near as amazing, although some French anime is made available in Quebec. Still, Quebec fans get a bit more anime than American fans, since we get everything released in the USA/Canada, and a bit of the French material as well. So for consumers that buy translated anime/manga, I would have to say that Quebec is the best place to live. Roughly 1/3 of my manga is in French, but I only have 1 French anime DVD. -t |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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I most definitely wouldn't say that Flower Mound is the best place to live in the USA is you are an anime fan.
The only benefit to living in/near Flower Mound is if you want to be an English anime dub actor. Even then, only if you plan on acting only in anime. |
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Tony K.
Subscriber Moderator  Posts: 11293 Location: Frisco, TX |
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Flower Mound just happens to be the HQ of the company, and not so much a "hub" of anime fans. Going through there a few times, it really does look like any other suburb of the D/FW metroplex.
For the 2 major conventions I've been to around here, a ton of fans like to migrate to A-Kon (mostly 'cause it's a summertime event and takes place in the heart of Dallas). But I honestly think anime fans, here, in the area are just as scattered about in the population as any other niche geek/nerd demographic (like gamers, franchise, or sports fans). It's just a matter of giving them a place to congregate. There are probably other factors to consider in terms of a "truer" representation of the fandom, though (such as age brackets, amount of money spent on anime-related goods, merchandise availability, the kind of anime they watch, etc.). Also, "best" is a very subjective term, and most people will probably try to base this off of a quantitative number (population) as opposed to some kind of qualitative one (which I have no idea what unit of measurement would even work for that). But yeah, 20k+ fans per A-Kon and growing is a lot, especially considering the obvious advantage the coastal cities have in having more international fans. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3445 Location: Finland |
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@Brent Allison
I live in Finland and... For someone like me who prefers online meeting places over physical meetups, 1, 2 & 4 aren't that much of an issue. Although if it did matter to someone here, it definitely would be somewhat lacking. But there are plenty of conventions held by fans, though I've never attended one... For point 3, I feel the relations between Finland and Japan are quite good. The Japanese embassy is quite active here, and there are a few other groups promoting exchange of cultures, so there's stuff to find, can't complain. And for point 5, I agree, online is the preferred method for most of us here. The domestic market for manga is somewhat substantial (There have even been a few manga's here whose English counterparts didn't come out or complete their run, and translations usually are straight from Japanese.). The domestic market for anime is non-existent however. And to little bit counter what Tempest said, the type of material may also influence where might the be best place to live. As it is now, in light of several news items in the past, one can't honestly say Canada, UK & Australia to be safest places when it comes to anything too 'risque' (still can't apprehend how Seven Seas can print some of their titles in Canada without issues...). A subscription for example ComicLO, or ordering doujinshis online, would probably not be very wise in any of those three, yet here it's not a problem. I actually had a package with doujinshis opened once. I had declared it as books ( I assumed all in that batch were just artbooks) which have lower customs fee, however they counted a lot of it as comics which has a higher one, so I had to redo the customs declaration and send it in again... |
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