Last summer, my good friend dondon went to China to visit his family and stuff. By the time he came back I was already off to college, so when I came back for winter vacation a few weeks ago the souvenirs he got became an incredibly convenient Christmas present. What did he get me from the copyright law enforcement-free streets of Beijing? Well, what else than a Chinese anime magazine?

Besides that, as pictured, I also got two volumes of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei in Chinese, doubling the size of my epic manga collection. The green one, with Kafuka, is in a shrink wrap and from an official publisher that has a label reading “only allowed to be sold in Taiwan”. Of course. The other one is counterfeit.

Besides that, lets talk about the magazine. The title literally translates as “East west new moe movement”, which makes an inking more sense in Chinese. It came with some goodies.

Yeah those are Saimoe playing cards in the upper left. More on those in a while. The magazine itself is also a treasure trove of goodness, and offered me some insight into the anime scene in China. Lets look inside.

Endless Eight just ended when this issue came out, and it looks like they were really happy about it over there, too. The text roughtly translates to “Endless August is over! Club president, you sure worked hard!” etc. etc. The tone is rather curt.

Saki seems pretty big, Saki and Nodoka are on the cover you know. There are also at least seven full color pages dedicated to everything about the show.

There’s a running stereotype that Chinese anime watchers watch only things like Bleach and Haruhi and to an extent I think that’s true. But when you think about it, isn’t that true in general for all anime fans? There’s a diverse anime community over there too and from the fact that there is enough interest in these shows for a monthly magazine to be published must say something. Really, this is full of shows I would actually/did watch (mostly its summer season stuff because this was late summer).

This magazine was out sometime in early September or late August (don’t ask why the cover says October) so it was smack dab in the middle of the first round of Saimoe Japan. There’s extensive, up to date coverage of Saimoe Japan with commentary and stats and stuff. Shiiiitttt, I thought my blog was Saimoe overkill.

And individual match overviews, even!

All decorated with images straight off Danbooru. I find the epic overview of Mio losing to Kana a mix of hilarious and entertaining. It’s like I’m reading a Saimoe blog in print. There was also lots of Comiket 76 coverage, of which pictures can be found at in the gallery at the end of this post. Two discs came along with the magazine as well:

The CD on the left is a bunch of stuff previewing C76 and other random music, pictures, and other media. The CD on the right is a data DVD containing the entirety of Haibane Renmei and Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka, fansubbed in Chinese in rmvb format. Gotta love Chinese copyright, but I truely fear the picture quality of two shows squeezed into a single DVD…

And of course, SAIMOE PLAYING CARDS

So, blatantly stolen artwork for the internet aside, this was super cool. What do I expect anyway? All I know now is that I will be getting lots of interesting comments at poker night. There’s also a neat feedback form I can fill out, and knowing me, I can’t resist writing on stationary with cute little girls on it.

Translation: “Do you have anything you want to say to East West New Moe Movement? Please write it all down!” To which I scribbled (excuse my handwriting I have not written Chinese in about a year and it was an uneven table) “plz publish this in America. Also, Nagi moe’d me to death.”

So one issue of the magazine, which came with two complete anime, a related media disc, and a pack of playing cards. Total price? 18 RMB (about three bucks).

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