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Japan's Gaming History Now Safe
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian today has covered the final part of the ongoing saga regarding the Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law in Japan. Thankfully, the law has been almost reversed allowing the continued sale of second hand electrical goods (including games consoles)." From the article: "The Japanese secondhand electrical goods market was officially estimated last year to be worth around £500m ... The government probably hoped the law would go largely unnoticed and bring a variety of benefits. By taking the money out of the secondhand market and injecting it into the market for new goods, regulation (of old products) and revivalisation (of the economy) would be achieved in one fell swoop. On paper, anyway. In practice it was rather different."
The Japanese government is completely controlled by large corporations.
The Japanese are already extremely wasteful. You should see how often they toss out perfectly good mobile phones all in an effort to get the next best thing.
Something as simple as taking home leftovers from a restaurant is unheard of. You could have an entire plate of food left over and they'll look at you like you've got two heads if you ask them to wrap it.
They've already got laws which make it prohibitively expensive to own a car for more than a few years. They're pretty much forced into buying new cars every couple of years.
Even without these laws Japanese are always clamoring after the shinest new product. I bet the Japanese government didn't expect people to have a problem with those regulations. In fact, I'm surprised people were upset enough that they went out and had demonstrations. Good for them, I'm glad to see they did do something about it.
I can't get over the idea that they seriously considered restricting secondhand markets. Functioning secondhand markets reduce the new purchase price of consumer goods since you can get some of your cash back if you decide to sell; in other words, it makes you more likely to but the new good in the first place. Removing this option reduces the effective demand for the new good, which is contrary to what they were planning to achieve. In addition, the environmental effects of such a policy would have been potentially terrible.
Um, have you ever been to "Hard Off"? (Yes mods, that's really the name. It's a sister store to "Book Off" and, also amusingly, "Kimono Off.") All they sell there are used electronics and used CDs/DVDs/VHSs. Yet they continue to be in business. Heck, just wander around the oh-so-trendy-now Akihabara section of Tokyo. That place is jam packed with shops selling used monitors, used game systems, used everything electronic. Used video games in Japan sell for pretty close to the original price, maybe minus only $5 or $10. My friend said he got good prices for reselling his games, but I haven't tried, so I can't give you a quote on that. Used games are also in really nice shape, generally, so it's almost worth the high cost.
Anyhow, it's not true that Japanese only buy new stuff.