Yoroshiku Fansubs

This was also translated a long time ago, in the Yoroshiku I era. During the brief life of Yoroshiku II, Fearless Leader captured TV Asahi’s rebroadcast of the Oishinbo movies, before he departed for places or spaces unknown. So, Yoroshiku Left Behind was able to finish the script and encode the transport stream, resulting in Oishinbo: Japan-America Rice Wars. This replaces the previous encode, which was a bit oversharpened and overbrightened. This one is also at a higher bit rate, and a few more QC issues have been found and fixed.

When we first did this movie, I wrote a longish postscript to warn people about the (boring and irrelevant) content. I’ll repost it here:

This anime dates from 1993, when American paranoia about, and Japanese confidence in, Japan’s technological and economic might was at its height (see, for example, Michael Crichton’s 1992 scare novel, “Rising Sun”). Shortly thereafter, the U.S. began the longest sustained technological and economic boom in its history, fueled by innovations in the Internet, biotechnology, and other fields, while Japan entered a fifteen year period of economic stagnation, rendering most of the arguments in this anime moot.

Japan maintained an effective ban on imported rice until 1995. At that time, Japan agreed to import a minimal amount at market prices, and imposed 490% tariffs on any imports in excess. Even though the tariffs impacted
the competitiveness of imported rice substantially, by 1998 Japan accounted for about half of California’s rice exports, or 20% of the state’s total rice crop.

Since then, Japan has gradually reduced tariffs, while substantially increasing subsidies to farmers in order to protect domestic farming from world-wide competition. The issue of food safety remains open, but organic farming has been steadily growing in both countries.

Tl;dr.

Download: Oishinbo: Japan-America Rice Wars v2

Update April, 2012: a colleague in GotWoot finally explained to me why the credits seem to flash on and off. I’ve updated the script to make a “v3” but it’s not worth releasing a new version. So here’s a patch that updates the script accordingly. There are no other changes.