Anime and manga populatiry where you live?

[Hideki Motosuwa.]

Just how popular are anime and manga where you're located? Also, how many restaurants/markets selling Japanese food/ items are there around your area?

I would say anime/manga is a little popular here. Back in high school, there were a small number of anime fans, and a few in my local college as well. I'm sure they made clubs that I never joined since I was never that social outside my small group of vocational shop friends. According to an acquaintance and anime/manga/Japanese culture fan I went to high school with, there are conventions in town, but I never bother reading up on. So perhaps anime is a bit more popular as I thought around here, I just don't get out much. When it comes to the food culture of Japan, two sushi restaurants opened up here within the last 2 years. The first one, right down the street from where I live. The second one replaced a Chinese restaurant (I'm pretty sure the staff at this one isn't Japanese, from what my mother tells me). A more fancy, well known restaurant has also been here a while, catering to Asian style cooking, which includes Japanese food. This place is literally a stones throw away from my apartment, but costs too much (which explains why I never go). At my mall, there is a Japanese restaurant at the food court, but it sells a lot of Chinese food, and the staff is Chinese as well. We also have a Chinese buffet here, and next to the sodas and dessert area is a sushi stand with a Chinese man in Japanese clothing that makes the sushi. In our Price Chopper market, there is a sushi section (also run by Chinese people). And lastly, there is an Asian market run by a really nice Filipina lady right under my apartment selling some Japanese stuff as well (I love Ramune lol).

[дух]

[Obey Kenshiro]

My .2 ... I hope you don't take offense to anything I say.

Just because Hibachi Grills, Chinese Restaurants(which are on every corner) Japanese Restaurants pop up, is meaningless to the fact that Anime/Manga is more popular then before .

As for my town, we have a few clubs at my University. We also have Cosplay shops, where they sell cosplay, snacks, and other nick nacks. I do love the Hibachi restaurants around here, they're just expensive.

I would love for a Manga shop to open up. Similar to something like Borders/Barnes an' Nobles

[Hideki Motosuwa.]

My .2 ... I hope you don't take offense to anything I say.

Just because Hibachi Grills, Chinese Restaurants(which are on every corner) Japanese Restaurants pop up, is meaningless to the fact that Anime/Manga is more popular then before .

As for my town, we have a few clubs at my University. We also have Cosplay shops, where they sell cosplay, snacks, and other nick nacks. I do love the Hibachi restaurants around here, they're just expensive.

I would love for a Manga shop to open up. Similar to something like Borders/Barnes an' Nobles

No no, I'm not trying to link anime/manga popularity to restaurants/stores. Perhaps I should've worded this a little differently?

Anyways, yeah, a manga shop would be nice. There are Japanese sellers with shops based in the US here, and seem to do plenty of business with ebay. It'd be nice if there was a doujin store around here too, those shipping and handling fees can be killer.

[星らぶ]

there is a small community of anime/manga fans here, and they are mostly adults.
there is one store I know that sells manga and anime etc and there is one publishing company that translates manga, but they are hideous sadly because they do not translate from japanese but from the english release
as for restaurants there are couple of those too

[Albear]

We have a store here that sells anime related merchandise and hello kitty stuff.
My local college has one anime club. I don't really know if anime is popular here, but the local convention is growing every year.

[Ranshiin]

No longer exists here.

The manga section at the library is gone, the manga section at the book store got merged with the 'graphic novels' section and now only has 10 chapters of Bleach there with all the Scott Pilgrim books, and the one store you could buy anime from closed sometime earlier this year.

Nobody I know who watched it watches it any more, and I'd guess in this day and age if you said you did you'd probably get lynched. Oh well.

[Obey Kenshiro]

Nobody I know who watched it watches it any more, and I'd guess in this day and age if you said you did you'd probably get lynched. Oh well.

I'm laughing harder than I should be at this post at 6:34 in the morning.


I live outside Atlanta, so with all the diversity around here, I'm sure there may be an anime shop around. The only one I do know is called "Anime-Zing Escape" .. It's a pretty cool place actually, it's just like an hour and change drive from my apartment. So I tend to talk about anime to select co-workers, my people I chat with at Starbucks, and my gaming buds. Lol...

It would be nice for Anime to go a bit mainstream, and more popular, but I kinda enjoy our small community of anime/manga lovers. Would you enjoy anime/manga as much if everyone watched it, similar to how everyone had an Apple product?

http://www.anime-zingescape.com

[CrimsonMoon]

Not as popular as it used to be. Most people here go for Korean drama and artists, and Japanese are pretty much forgotten, let alone its manga and anime. People here doesn't seem to watch anime and read manga. It's very rare to talk to people who like anime and manga here anymore.

As for Japanese food, they're not sold in my area, however there are Japanese restaurants in the capital city, which is only about 20 minutes from home. There are limited numbers of Japanese restaurants here. And even rarer shops selling Japanese items.

[AnimeLover7]

Unfortunately here people do not make difference between an anime and a cartoon, so I'm a lost anime/manga fan...

[Token Black Guy]

Most anime related shops near me are usually around 23-50 miles away, and i heard a few ones that are close by were shut down. Some comic shops do dell some manga/anime stuff, but it's not a huge variety. Haven't been to Barnes and Noble in a while, so i don't know if their manga section shrunk or not. As far as anime clubs go, there was never one in my schools. There is one in my community college, but it isn't worth going to since (from my experiences) most of the members very closed minded and can be describe with one word. There was a second anime club and even a japanese/asian culture club, but they got dissolved by the current anime club. I haven't tried any clubs in some of the shops, but i fear that it may end up being like what i experienced in the college.

There are a few conventions, but i usually never hear about them until the last minute. There maybe a few Japanese restaurants around here, but i never really looked into it. As far as meeting other anime fans i haven't met many that were open to discuss it and the few i have met can be described with one word(that is censored on this site), and for some reason are uppity and would end up hating/not liking you if you don't like the same stuff they like. For example: I'm not really into Full Metal Alchemist, and that makes some people want to tear my head off and kick it around like a soccer ball.

[Clayton_n]

I'm in Utah and we just had the biggest first time comicon ever...

[darkrider21]

I don't know all I know about is a weekly anime meeting at one of the city's collages that is if it's not in a hiatus status because I heard about it a year or 2 ago

[Mystelinth]

Ehh since my country isn't that big, i guess you could say there a shops nearby, if i take the train for example i could be at one within 20 min. But that one doesn't sell that much, so i'd have to take another train to a place were they sell more.

I noticed i said that there are shops nearby but i'm not sure if there is a shop that sells ONLY anime and manga. I do know there are quite a few book shops that happen to have their manga section. ... That being said, i don't think i've ever seen a dvd or blu-ray disk containing anime in a store. Except from Spirited Away and Grave of the Fireflies i guess.

Hmhh im not getting to the point, well is it popular? Hmhh no, do i know people who watch it? Yeah i know a few, but they don't talk about it a lot unless they're alone with people who also watch it.

Restaurants? Yeah sure, there are a few in every larger city.

Sometimes i feel like a treasure hunter when stumbling upon another anime/manga fan. I think that contains what i've said in a nutshell.

[Unicron]

This location is dead. Maybe i'm the only one?

[KyouFalls]

NOPE. In the city I live in at the moment their isn't even a bookstore.... The library probably has 1 or 2 manga but it wasn't as it used to be years ago.

[NanoNanoPudding]

There was a Barnes n' Nobels around over here that sold Manga, but I heard rumours that they shut down.
They sell DVDs and boxsets of Anime in Video Palace around here.

[ChibiLovett]

The interest here seems to be steadily growing, but unfortunately I fear a lot of them seem to be "OMG It's geeky, therefore I love it!" people that only like it because it's cool to be underground and, well, geeky, and that usually watch only Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and/or Death Note, maybe Fairy Tale. But not all. I still know quite a few people that really do like it. My high school had (and still has) a Japanese club that was fairly good sized and we spent every other day during lunch watching anime and our club shirts for the year I was there had Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff on them. My friend that's still there said they went to Nihon Matsuri. There was a "Utaku" club at the university I attended briefly that seemed fairly prosperous. The anime con I go to every year is always packed and gets bigger each time. We also recently had a huge first-time ComicCon. (I live in Utah.)

As for Japanese culture stuff in general, I know of a few of the big hibachi restaurants as well as some smaller, locally owned general Japanese food ones and a lot of sushi bars. I've seen quite a few Asian shops and there's a Japanese one specifically in town around where I am specifically. Based on what my friends told me, the Nihon Matsuri festival is pretty successful. That's the extent of what I know.

[Space Cowboy 2112]

I live in a suburb of San Diego and I don't hear too much about anime from my close friends, mind a few exceptions. But I went to a party recently with tons of anime kids and it was a ballin time

[~OTAKYU~]

Philipines Kuroko No Basket~