Rome (and other HBO releases) in Japan

[McCrutchy]

This is for the two other people besides me who care.

I noticed recently that HBO's Rome series box dropped significantly in price on Amazon.co.jp, so I decided to import it, because for a long time, I have always wanted to know if the discs are handled differently in Japan. Unlike other WB-made discs, you'll notice that HBO releases never contain Japanese options, hidden or otherwise, and instead Japanese support appears only on Japan domestic releases.

In Japan, Rome carries Eirin's R-15 rating on video, meaning restricted to 15 and over. Unlike some Japanese releases, this is evident from looking at the back of the box. Usually, at this rating, my experience has been that Japanese optical censorship will apply only to genitalia, and not to pubic regions. With other words, as far as most HBO product is concerned, female frontal nudity is uncensored, while male frontal nudity is censored. In sampling Rome, this appears to be the case--in the pilot episode, Polly Walker's fully nude scene in the bath is left uncensored. As I had never seen the series before, I went looking online for a described instance of full frontal male nudity, and ran headlong into the infamous James Purefoy scene in Episode 4. Here, Purefoy's full-frontal nudity during bathing was blurred. The blurring is done very tastefully, and is opaque, so it is not that intrusive, but still, I thought the curious few might like to know. To be fair, I did see a long shot of a nude man that appeared to be uncensored, so I think HBO/WB is doing everything they can to keep the series as uncensored as possible, while keeping an R-15 rating.

Please note that I have only just received the set, and I don't know if my comments hold true for the entire series. However, at this point, I think it's safe to assume that any HBO product sold in Japan which is not marked as "R-18" or "R-18+" will definitely have optical censorship if male nudity is involved (e.g. Game of Thrones, which is also R-15 in Japan).

Unfortunately, that isn't the only negative to the Japanese edition. Although it is also 10 BDs altogether, and the episode breakdown is the same per disc, and even given that they had to alter the video encode, HBO/WB do not appear to have maximized the available space on the discs at all. For example, the Western Season 1 Disc 1 measures 39,913,290,721 bytes, while the same disc in the Japanese set measures only 26,420,506,470 bytes. The video bitrate for this disc in the Western set is around 28 Mbps, while the Japanese disc is around 22 Mbps. Worst of all, it appears that the audio commentaries and some or all of the graphics-based extras are absent from this set. About the only positive is that the set does retain most or all of the video extras, and even has English subtitles for them, but the menus are all in Japanese, so I cannot be totally sure what video extras are and aren't present without tediously picking apart each disc.

HBO waited almost five years to the day to release this series in Japan, and I have to say, even at face value, it's a disappointment compared to the Western edition. At least some optical censorship, compressed video, missing extras, and disc space wasted. At the very least, they could have offered it uncensored at R-18, like most other Western companies do in Japan.

So, if considering HBO product from Japan, buyer beware.