Spend any time in Japan, and you’ll see them: Chinese tourists. While tensions do flare between the two countries, there are Chinese who are infatuated with Japanese popular culture.
Thus, the Chinese province of Anhui has this: a newly opened “anime” themed hotel. Japan, alert your lawyers.
According to an ANN News report (via Japan Probe), there are rooms featuring characters from Dragonball and Doraemon as well as entire manga panels. Besides a “jail room” and a “study room”, there is even a Howl’s Moving Castle room, complete with a mural depicting the famed Hayao Miyazaki anime.
A representative of the hotel, a young woman in her twenties, told ANN, “We all love Japanese anime.” The hotel is aimed at young Chinese customers.
The owners apparently did not get permission for using the characters in the hotel (and doesn’t seem worried about getting it), bringing back memories of the Chinese theme park that erected its own Gundam. Or the Chinese toymaker who made its own Gundam toys. Or the other Chinese theme park that used Disney characters without permission. Or…
One room is supposed to look like a traditional Japanese inn. It doesn’t, and there’s a weird pop-up mahjong table. Rather, it looks like what a Chinese person thinks a traditional Japanese inn might look like, complete with a Mt. Fuji mural. The announcer compares the room to a single guy’s apartment.
Knowing how wrong Japan gets other countries when it interprets them for domestic consumption, seeing the Japanese TV news media getting so nitpicky about the nuances of Japanese inns is fascinating.
Don’t think of this hotel as simply blatant disregard of copyright law, think of it as a love letter to Japanese pop culture. That disregards copyright law.
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