Hey!⁠—*cough* ooof
uuuh he
Too much time indoors. Trial 2:
Hey! Hi everyone! It's Loretta from KemushiChan!
So, recently I posted my Netflix shows review video and you guys really seem to like that, but I did
obviously notice that there is a very common theme amongst the comments section.
I get it!
I'm getting to that.
[ Shall we begin? ]
Today, I'm going to show you how hacked Japan's region locked content.
The secret to my little hack is . . .
none of this.
When I first started learning Japanese around in middle school or high school,
it would still be wild wild west of the internet where you could get literally
everything online, and with subtitles.
Things today are a lot more regulated in the whole streaming front.
With Netflix, Amazon, Hulu: even if you pay for a service, you still only really get to pay for that region.
But there is a way around it that I've used ever since
high school⁠—at least⁠—and it's legal, and it's low-tech. It's not high-tech.
You gotta-You gotta-You got a real it backwards.
So with content, Japan is still pretty old-school.
There's still Tower Records stores, CDs, CD players, and DVDs even.
Like physical disks.
They're still being sold pretty widely both in stores and also online
Like on Amazon. See where I'm going with this this?
This video is not sponsored by Amazon or any other little tips I'm about to recommend,
but if you guys are listening and you do want to help me out
Let's talk later. Huh?
So here's what you need:
a laptop,
an external DVD player,
and a free software that you're gonna love called "VLC Player".
Disney movies, childhood cartoons, your entire Saturday morning!
Literally, all you have to do is go onto amazon.co.jp
even if you have an account on
Amazon US or wherever it is,
you still need to make a separate account ⁠—with the same email address if you want⁠— amazon.co.jp
Haha!
See, and here's the trick!
If you want to practice your Japanese, by all means be my guest.
You can do the entire, you know, you can do the entire process in Japanese and still use a foreign address
but if you you are more comfortable in English,
you can just change the language settings and check out that way.
I even did this back in the day for my brother when I bought his entire family the Italian box set series of Duck Tales.
~A whooo~
The DVD player itself can be anything it can be cheap. This is the one that I've used for . . .
uh
uuuuh like,
10-15 years?
It's just a basic Asus DVD player
I'll put the link below if you're curious which one I use.
The reason why I originally bought this is because DVDs are usually region-locked.
My laptop kept telling me that I had to switch regions on my DVD player in the actual laptop,
and that you can only do it up to three times before it permanently sets to one region or the other.
To get around that though,
if you have an external DVD drive, you can either set this one permanently
or in most cases they just state regionless.
Your laptop itself may not actually recognize the DVD at first, which is why VLC player is really helpful.
It pretty much plays almost anything without having to download extra codecs or anything crazy like that.
I've said DVD today more than I have in like . . .
ten years.
But anyways.
You basically, you plug it in, right-click the drive
and from there, you say "open in VLC Player" and it'll play the DVD and ask you if you want to have audio in
Japanese or English or
subtitles and Japanese or English; whatever options came with the actual DVD itself.
One quick tip while you're shopping on Amazon: Some of the DVDs,
especially if they're not sold by Amazon Japan itself,
some of the DVDs won't ship abroad and
by the time you get your cart and you change your language settings
The last thing you want to do is get like "Waah wahh! Wrong!" right?
So to save yourself a headache, when you go on to Amazon Japan⁠,
change the language settings or don't whichever you wish⁠,
then at that point before you start shopping, go ahead and put in your address, your shipping address,
so it shows up in the corner.
It'll kind of cue the system to let you know.
The little notifications will show on each product saying which ones will ship internationally,
which ones don't etc, etc.
So, you know, save yourself a little headache.
I don't have them all with me here, but
~Do you guys gonna see my collection?~
~My childhood favorites?~
Quick movie haul!
The first one is my favorite Japanese movie Tampopo. This one is just absolutely hilarious.
Watanabe Kenji
Uh what? Woah, who is that?
Watanabe Ken and Yakusho Kōji. Two of my favorite actors are in this movie.
I actually haven't seen in a while. I should see it again.
This one is not so family-friendly.
My imports:
Number One: I actually bought this one for a Boomer as a Christmas gift
which is something that I think I made my parents do this like every birthday and every Christmas.
I was like,
"Can you please just buy me, like, Cardcaptor Sakura DVDs?"
because they had the dub version when I was growing up but, you know, they didn't have the⁠—
Uugh. I sound like that person.
They didn't have the subtitled version! The unedited subtitled version! So I had to get the uncentered
uncensored!
Un . . . dubbed, beautiful, original version DVD and I had my parents buy them like every birthday and . . .
every Christmas.
But I decided to extend this mania to Boomer.
This is
"オリビアの大冒険" or the "Great Mouse Detective" in the original Japanese.
This is one of those great Disney Vault movies that's lesser-known, but actually really hilarious
but it's all in Japanese~~
"Region 2 with English and Japanese subtitles"
Since things have been so grim and homesicky recently,
we watched this while eating pancakes on a Sunday morning and it was just like,
*inhales*
"Aaaah! It's just such a refreshing way to feel like home again."
Recognize this one?
~Taa-daa!!~
A Little Princess in Japanese.
Have you guys seen this one before? is this ageing me?
This was just like every 90's girls movie. this one and Ever After with uuum . . . with Drew Barrymore.
This was my childhood,
preteen, like, favorite movie ever!
I watched this movie like hundreds of times in English. And then when I just watched it in Japanese,
I know the lines by heart!
I know every line. But when you watch it in Japanese
suddenly you get to just like, slot in all the words that you already know and now you're hearing it in Japanese.
Mm-hmm~♡
Ratatouille!
I love cooking, I love food, and I love their whole recent trend of like,
personifying things you'd normally find gross. Like a certain character and Wall-e if you know what I mean.
Stop jumping in Twinkies!
But yeah
The last one I wanted to show you:
♪~Bum-buda-bum-bum-paaa~♪
Lord of the Rings . . .
in Japanese . . .
is not currently in my hand right now. I was going to show you guys,
I have the Japanese Lord of the Rings box set, but I just checked it.
It's not this one. I think I left it back at our home in, New York
I did also get the entire extended Lord of the Rings DVD boxset in Japanese and . . .
watched it. Wow. I think my nerd factor is like going through the roof as we speak.
Maybe on my next trip home, whenever that is, I'll do a review of my favorite, you know clean my
Japanese bookshelf thing with you guys. Who knows.
With everything being the way that it is right now,
being able to just kind of like wake up on the weekend and watch a childhood favorites has been a really nice way to
break up the long weeks kind of like still have that same Saturday morning nostalgic feel.
Recess, Sword in the Stone, being able to do that in Japanese is just really exciting again
and really soothing at the same time.
Obviously, it's going to cost money to stock up on all these DVDs
but if you can't get someone to buy them for you as a gift,
the idea of just at least buying like one or two of your favorites and starting a collection from there is really
it's-it's a really fun way to break up the mundane current situation that we're in.
Pro Tip: If you live in a big city like New York or LA or something like that,
check if there is a Book Off or Kinokuniya, specifically if there is a Book Off.
I spent so many weekends just at Book Off buying used DVDs in Japanese with subtitles.
Book Off is the new store version.They do have an online website I checked and I didn't see any DVDs on it.
So if you are abroad, you can use Amazon. Not sponsored.
I'm thinking it may be time to add to the collection.
Maybe I need some Duck Tails.
~Whoo-ooo (*^▽^*))♪~
Yeah, so how about you guys?
If you could watch any of your childhood favorites, or even of your current favorites, in Japanese
what would it be? I'm looking for some new TV shows and movie recommendations all the time
so feel free to write it in a comment and I will talk to you guys there.
Then, thank you so much for your time!
I'll see you my next video. Bye!
Mmmmmuaaaah~!