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When I was in New York, I had to go through the closing of Asahiya Bookstore, which affected me as I had to get a subscription from the much more expensive Kinokuniya. Then, I had to go through the closing of the LA Asahiya. While my magazines are being mailed to me for the remainder of the subscription (4 more months), I have to settle with the more expensive Kino or drive twice as far to the Asahiya in Torrance. (good news is that the New York Asahiya re-opened in a new location).
But now, I find out that Sasuga Bookstore in Boston is being relegated to a warehouse. This is their front page message:
After more than a decade in our Cambridge store, we are packing up and moving to a new location. Our new digs will be a spacious warehouse in Waltham, MA, approximately 15 minutes outside of Boston. From our new location we will focus on our internet business, anime conventions, and wholesale operations. We will be open to the public every Saturday from 12:00pm - 6:00pm. We will continue to carry a wide variety of Japanese books and magazines, anime goodies, DVDs, origami books and paper, electronic dictionaries and more. As always, we will be doing magazine subscriptions, special orders and selling a limited selection of used books.
While I've never been to their store in person, I've done subscriptions with them and had pretty good service. There's a part of me that believes that the volitility is due to the obscene number of manga and books being translated into English as companies try to ride the current Japanese manga/anime fad. Why would a new fan want to learn Japanese and buy authentic Japanese comics if there's a re-packaged English translation readily available from B&N? Given the rat-race mentality of most fans, I doubt many of them are going to sacrifice years to learn Japanese only to find out that their peers have already read years worth of manga in English. It's capitalism, I guess...and a reflection of the mentality of a certain portion of the population.
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