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If by saying you "want to buy" music you really mean that ONLY downloads are acceptable, I cannot help you at all.

If you are willing to buy audio CDs, then the following are legitimate sellers for 2 of the countries in your list.
1) Chinese music can be bought at http://www.yesasia.com./ I've bought from them for years and they do not sell any bootlegged product. Period. "Chinese music" includes just about anything sold in mainland China plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. There's also http://www.amazon.cn/ but I've never bought anything from them and can't really offer any guidelines on how easy/difficult it is to use their website or what kind of selection they have. I think it has an English interface, but you'll find YesAsia much easier to deal with. YesAsia also sells books and movies for those interested in such things. I mostly buy movies from them.
2) For Brazilian music you can deal with http://www.somlivre.com.br/ who also does not sell anything bootlegged and they also sell movies and Portuguese language books.

Hari Kiri.. Only uninformed or deceived Westerners refer to "Hari Kari"

http://home.no.net/harakiri/

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http://www.parida.com/seppuku.html

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku

"Vocabulary and Etymology

Seppuku is also known as hara-kiri (, "cutting the belly") and is written with the same kanji as seppuku but in reverse order with an okurigana. In Japanese, hara-kiri is a colloquialism, seppuku being the more formal term. Samurai (and modern adherents of bushido) would use seppuku, whereas ordinary Japanese (who in feudal times as well as today looked askance at the practice) would use hara-kiri. Hara-kiri is the more common term in English, where it is often mistakenly rendered "hari-kari.""

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http://www.answers.com/topic/seppuku-1

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(Probably the blame can be squarely laid at the feet of hollywood and any servicepersons and tourists from the West who "just didn't get it" or who just didn't give a damn...)

But, it is carried out with a "tanto":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanto

If you want to see it performed in a film (quite messy in real life and somewhat in the film), see:

Brother,

Starring and produced/directed by Kitano Takeshi (of "Beat"...) and starring Omar Epps

http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/2001/brother01.shtml

http://www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/product.asp?sku=D27123

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222851/

http://global.yesasia.com/en/artIdxDept.aspx/section-videos/code-j/aid-30742/

and,

http://www.heroic-cinema.com/reviews/brother

"this film sure is one violent sonofabitch. If you're not down for that, then maybe you should check to see if you can get into a session of Harry Potter instead. Some of the harshest violence in it is self-inflicted (that brother thing again, but taken to an illogical and hella messy degree). And all of it is LOUD. Handguns are like cannons. Kicks are like wrecking balls. Punches are like car crashes. Car crashes are like - well, like car crashes. I think the punches are louder."

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Anyway, I will always respect Kitano-san for how he ended the film, something rarely permitted in many western films. You have to see it for yourself...

All I can say is, be glad you don't live in Japan. CDs here generally sell for around ¥3000-3500 ($25-29 at the current exchange rate of ¥120:$1). Singles are generally ¥1000-1600 ($9-14). What's worse is that the prices are printed on the back label, so pretty much every store has the same price- you don't get those "Virgin Special Price $9.99" stickers anywhere.

On the other hand, we also don't generally get DVD's packaged as a bonus on a regular basis. Japan does. Japanese inserts are also usually much thicker than ours, with tons of photos - heck, several of my "regular" (non-SE) CD's from Japan came with a whole separate photo book (as does the random CD I'm linking to above). Even the CD cases themselves are thicker and better made. In short, you get what you pay for.

The RIAA's problem is they've been downgrading the value of their product for years, which of course is going to drive both demand and prices down along with it. Imagine if every big new release here came with the first couple singles (including b-sides), a live DVD, and a photo book - and that was the regular edition! That's akin to the situation in Japan much of the time. So it's no surprise that CD's there cost $25 or so and that people will pay it - they'd pay it here too if there was actually that much value in the product being offered.

There is probably an obvious answer to this, but why is it that I can go to an importing site such as http://www.yesasia.com/ and buy that Japanese dance album? Is yesasia doing something illegal by selling me, in the states, a Japanese album licensed only to Japanese territories? This seems more comparable than the 'walk into a record store' comparison.

ogg is much better than mp3, let's keep our chins high, besides, this ogg-supporting player is brilliant:

http://us.yesasia.com/en/PrdDept.aspx/pid-10040601 54/code-c/section-electronics/

"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.

For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.

If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.

The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.

For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.

For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.

Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.

What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!

I don't understand why downloading it through Steam costs $49.99 when you can get it from places like http://www.yesasia.com/ for $39.99. I thought using Steam was going to cut out the middle man and save the buyer money while also increasing Valve's profits. So much for their great idea of direct downloading...

Couldn't find any samples but:

Info
purchase @ Amazon
purchase @ Yesasia
Hope this helps

The soundtrack to the game is also very quirky and catchy.
Download a few tracks here and if you like it you can purchase the official release here

I believe the Boxset is different than the DVD that I have.

The one that I have is this one. I had purchased it while I was traveling in Japan last summer and actually even bought a cheapo region 2 dvd player to ship home... hehe. (Yeah, I know it's pretty pathetic).

To give you an example, just a few minutes into the movie, when the girls arrive at their new home upon getting off the truck with their father, they venture to this stream where they see some fishe in the water. As the girls look down into the stream, the view is shifted so that what you see on the screen is just the fishes swimming in the stream, and the only audio is the water rushing through the bed. If you have the Japanese audio track enabled, this is what you hear. If you have the english audio enabled, however, they actually are speaking an additional lines which are not present in the Japanese audio track. Now, I don't know what all the legal mumbo jumobo is between Ghibli and Disney, but if that isn't changing the movie, then I don't know what is. I mean they are adding in lines into the movie that weren't there in the first place. I thought at first I was going nuts and there was a problem with my DVD player or my TV. After much investigation I found that the subtitles that were provided on the disc is indeed just the script for the english audio track. Thus, instead of watching subtitles for a supposed Japanese translation, I am merely reading the English Dub scripts. Perhaps the dub scripts are just as fine, with the added lines. But I am not certain. I will have to go back to my fansubs of Totoro which is now over 10 years old... lol.

So please!!! Re-release the Totoro DVD :-)

Best of 2003:

• The Station Agent - A dwarf makes unlikely friends.
• Whale Rider - Overcoming macho BS.
• Better Luck Tomorrow - Amoral rich kids.
• Owning Mahowny - Banker gambles away millions
• Lost in Translation - Funny, deep.
• LOTR: Return of the King
• Oseam - sad Korean anime
• Animatrix - All style

Worst of '03:

• Matrix Revolutions
• Bulletproof Monk
• Teknolust - One of those movies that tries really hard to look tech-clever, but falls on its face.
• Firefight (I could only stand to watch the first 10 minutes of this Balwin B-movie)

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I hate region code so much that I will never buy a movie unless it's playable in all regions (Ya, you can find some of those movies in YesAsia. The region code itself does not stop a 15-year-old Joe from ripping the movie and share it by P2P, rather than that, it stops me from buying movies (no matter how good the movies are). Think about it, it is a nonsense idea that a book that I bought can only be read in some environment, not the other. So does movies.

It's happened to the best of us....just learn from your mistakes and do your research next time. Anime on DVD's "R2 and beyond" forum is a good place to start. There are also "safe" retailers like Yesasia

I also buy most of my movies from them. A lot of the movies can be bought three at a time for $10/each (if you don't buy them in 3s to get the discount, they're usually $12-$15). VCDs are even cheaper if you want to go that route. You can get region-free DVD players from them as well (the Shinsonic is not a bad set, although there is a weird "vertical line ghosting" issue on large blocks of static, dark, solid colors).

I very highly recommend them. One note of warning is that they take a few days to process and ship orders, since they often have to ship some stuff from their HK (I assume) warehouse to California before it will ship out to a US customer. They do seem to have been trimming this turnaround down a little (average delivery time, from time of order, using overnight is now one week), so either they're getting a little more efficient or they know me well enough that I'll keep on coming back spending hundreds each month, as long as they keep me happy. ;-)

Anyway, if you're into Korean, Japanese or Chinese music/movies/etc, definitely give them a look. And, no, I do not work for them or have any relationship with them other than being a very satisfied customer.

There is a much better, (i.e. intentionally funny) Street Fighter movie, and it's also from HK. It's called Future Cops, and it's available on DVD now, too.

The plotline doesn't really follow SF (Vega is good, E. Honda and Ken are evil, Guile has black hair, etc.) but it's funny as hell. And Chingmy Yau's a hottie.

I think what happens to most of these movies is they get caught in between camp/special effects/trying to make a plot. If you just go for the cheese straight out, you'll at least please the people that wanted a comedy.