Collection Japanese imports is a terribly expensive hobby. They may not drive like Cadillacs, but they're certainly more satisfying and interesting than stamps, in my opinion. For, do stamps sing? Do cars spark the imagination? Well, in an extremely figurative sense, perhaps a stamp or car enthusiast would say yes (Can you imagine what car fan-fiction would read like?) But why Japanese imports? One could easily collect and support domestic creations, music bands, trading cards, comic books, and etc. I guess one of the reasons is because they are domestic. One of the reasons collections are collections and not comglomerations of related objects is because of their unusualness. Anime used to be the a most unusual thing around when I was in middle school, so that I'd never heard of it while I was reading American comic books and such. Nowadays, anime is slowly becoming a main stream addition to any video archive, despite the American tendency to pick the most aggressive, sexually tense, and violent from the vast Japanese anime selection to ease marketing and circumvent cultural differences. Even that is changing. But no one collects American Pokemon products because they are rare (well, perhaps someone in Japan would). It is generally true that Weiß kreuz things are difficult to find in America, because 1) it's new, 2) it's relatively unpopular to an audience that is largely disinterested in the Japanese voice acting industry, 3) the storyline isn't that wonderful, 4) 75% (an arbitrary but approximate number in my mind) the animation is either adequate or sucks (but ooh... that other 25%.... *starry eyes*), 5) it's not from Bandai, 6) it hasn't been fansubbed completely anywhere in English, and last, but certainly not -the- last, 7) it wasn't very popular in Japan except for the folks who like seiyuu. Actaully, from the last time I searched on a Japanese search engine, there were more English Weiß homepage links than Japanese ^^; So back to collecting imports. Well, I had original been drawn to Weiß by its manga art by Tsuchiya Kyoko, which is generally (or by its animation, but I'd only seen the manga art then... if I'd started with the animation, it might have all been different...) how I judge anime first off, which may sound shallow, but it really helps in terms of collecting ^^;; since it narrows down my likeable anime by tons. The manga itself had a really interesting storyline, despite the characters being introduced only briefly, their past hinted at, and the art, especially the poster art, was wonderful. The anime was a little nggh.... but if they had actually put some more effort into developing the villains (the random ones, not the Schwarz and Schreient kind) more, instead of making them mere cannon fodder with evil twisting faces O.o; ... I mean.. Takatori was rather evil. Hikage was rather dull. So, why collect Weiß? Well, for one, I thought that it was neat that a voice actor had started his own anime series and succeeded immensely, considering that the original scope was a radio talk show. I actually have the Newtype ad for that, with one of Tsuchiya's images for the Image Album. I loved Tsuchiya art after that, so I tried to get as much as I could, which wasn't much... manga, postcard set, a pencilboard... then I just randomly ordered the Dramatic Image Albums, and everything changed. Then, the seiyuu got their proper recognition (other than "Koyasu did Hotohori, right?"). And everything blew out of proportion. Compact Disks. Videos. Cels. Pencil Boards. Books. Postcards. Idol Cards. Random Miscellany. HTML coded by Jey Kama, circa 9.5.99. Most of the pictures here were also edited by him, so don't steal, please. But otherwise, the original artwork will always remain copyright Project Weiß. Homepage pop-up window free from Xoom!!