My, you do display quite the narrow view of an incredibly diverse art form. That's much like saying all videos or magazines are historically nothing more than pornography. Juse because you live in a country that refuses to acknowledge or import the wide selection of the anime and manga products that Japan offers to it's local markets, you jump to assumption that the small smattering of titles you see there represent the whole of the industry. Talk about stereotyping or disecting something into anotomical parts... I would suggest doing a bit of research on a topic before jumping to conclusions. Anime and Manga are heavlily intermixed in Japan and often redundant. Japan has a HUGE selection of manga marketed directly at/for young women, can the US claim such a market for cartoons and comics? Manga also has huge markets in young and old men with sports titles/themes that have less sexual content than sesame street let alone sports illustrated. That's not even touching on the titles for working women, housewives, cooking or general entertainment. Anime and manga touch on much more than you would allow people (and possibly yourself) to think. There is no doubt that there is a pornographic market as well, but that's more like 3% of the marketplace. Now if you want to count showing a womans breasts in an onsen (Japanese hot springs), you might want to consider some of the less puritanical societies that exist in the world.
The above 'supply and demand' answer is correct. The anime market in north america while growing, is still quite small when you consider most other dvd releases are backed by major companies with advertising involved to help subsidise the price. Something coming from Warner Brothers has a much higher demand than most anime titles, same goes for Disney and other studios. When they're selling hundreds of thousands of copies instead of a few thousand copies it makes a big difference in the pricing of the product.
Slashdot Mirror
My, you do display quite the narrow view of an incredibly diverse art form. That's much like saying all videos or magazines are historically nothing more than pornography. Juse because you live in a country that refuses to acknowledge or import the wide selection of the anime and manga products that Japan offers to it's local markets, you jump to assumption that the small smattering of titles you see there represent the whole of the industry. Talk about stereotyping or disecting something into anotomical parts... I would suggest doing a bit of research on a topic before jumping to conclusions. Anime and Manga are heavlily intermixed in Japan and often redundant. Japan has a HUGE selection of manga marketed directly at/for young women, can the US claim such a market for cartoons and comics? Manga also has huge markets in young and old men with sports titles/themes that have less sexual content than sesame street let alone sports illustrated. That's not even touching on the titles for working women, housewives, cooking or general entertainment. Anime and manga touch on much more than you would allow people (and possibly yourself) to think. There is no doubt that there is a pornographic market as well, but that's more like 3% of the marketplace. Now if you want to count showing a womans breasts in an onsen (Japanese hot springs), you might want to consider some of the less puritanical societies that exist in the world.
The above 'supply and demand' answer is correct. The anime market in north america while growing, is still quite small when you consider most other dvd releases are backed by major companies with advertising involved to help subsidise the price. Something coming from Warner Brothers has a much higher demand than most anime titles, same goes for Disney and other studios. When they're selling hundreds of thousands of copies instead of a few thousand copies it makes a big difference in the pricing of the product.