Things you never realised about Transformers (toys etc)

[DELTAprime]

Is anyone here acquainted with the Japanese legal system? Because now I'm wondering how Takara and Treasure were both allowed to be in the same market segment of video games simultaneously.

In the west that would be considered brand confusion and get one of the companies to get a big legal win.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

Is anyone here acquainted with the Japanese legal system? Because now I'm wondering how Takara and Treasure were both allowed to be in the same market segment of video games simultaneously.

In the west that would be considered brand confusion and get one of the companies to get a big legal win.

At this point I should probably mention a few things about Goki and myself so people know why we're chiming in on this. Goki (hope you're OK with me mentioning this @Goki, it's reasonably common knowledge and you've mentioned it yourself on the boards a few times) is a Japanese language teacher here in Oz, i.e. he teaches kids Japanese in schools. His Japanese is way better than mine, which is very rudimentary, mostly strong Osaka dialect, and also very rusty. I'm an English as a Foreign Language teacher - technically we're supposed to call it TESOL now, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, which includes English as a Foreign and English as a Second/Additional Language, but I'm very much specialised in being 'the token English/foreign guy' in contexts where there's not much English used in everyday life. I have a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics and a few other postgraduate 'teaching English as a language' qualifications, and I lived in Japan as a school-based English teacher for a couple of years where I learned Japanese from scratch, hence why I speak a local dialect. My Japanese should be way better than it is but I basically worked too much and didn't practice enough so it never developed as much as it should have. Baka Odie. Either way, both of us have a reasonably solid English-Japanese issues knowledge base, but as a general rule I figure it's better to let Goki do the board explanations on Japanese language stuff because he teaches it to English speakers whereas I taught English to Japanese speakers, so he's the Expert so to speak.
Goki actually came to Japan when I was over there and we spent a day along with his family and some friends of his hitting up the Transformers shops in Osaka, it was a fun day.

Anyway, as for Treasure VS Takara, I can't speak as to the legal side of things, but from a straight-up language side of things Takara (the company, which is now Takara-Tomy after a merger with Tomy) uses the Japanese word for 'treasure', albeit written in a script that wouldn't normally be used for the word - Japanese uses a few different 'kinds' of written scripts, the main ones are katakana, hiragana, and kanji, with (a few different styles of) Romaji which is basically using the English alphabet to transcribe Japanese words/sounds. I won't go into it a lot because it's kind of complicated. The key bit is that Takara is a Japanese word that 'means' 'treasure', whereas the Treasure トレジャー company uses the English word written in Japanese (katakana) script, so they're two different words. It's kind of like if you had a company called 'Red Company inc.' here in Australia and someone else started up a 'Rouge Company inc.' (rouge being French for 'red'), the different language used for the name would probably address the legal-confusion angle. It's a little bit different from that because English is basically the world 'lingua franca'/common language these days, i.e. it's pretty much the default most common language people use to talk with other people if they don't speak the same native/national/regional languages, and Japan also has a pretty strong historical relationship with 'the West'/America ever since America forced them to open up to the world back in the mid-1800s (again, long and complicated bit we don't have to get into), so English has a kind of national-psychological 'bigger place' in Japan than French does here in Australia.
But yeah - different names, different companies, also different main focus for said companies - shouldn't cause legal problems or misunderstandings, not least because 'treasure' isn't a widely-known English word in Japan.

[GoktimusPrime]

It's a little bit different from that because English is basically the world 'lingua franca'/common language these days, i.e. it's pretty much the default most common language people use to talk with other people if they don't speak the same native/national/regional languages, and Japan also has a pretty strong historical relationship with 'the West'/America ever since America forced them to open up to the world back in the mid-1800s (again, long and complicated bit we don't have to get into), so English has a kind of national-psychological 'bigger place' in Japan than French does here in Australia.

I'm not a history expert, but I think English words started flooding into the Japanese language and overall society during the U.S. post-war occupation of Japan. Post-pre-WWII saw a lot of German, Dutch, French (etc.) words enter Modern Japanese, e.g. arubaito (arbeit), enerugii (energie), desshin (dessin) etc. Pre-Meiji European loanwords mostly came from Jesuit missionaries; so words entering from Portuguese and Spanish e.g. pan (pan), tempura (tempora) etc.
Yes, the "Japanese" word 'tempura' is actually of Portuguese origin and is related to the word temporal. Tempura anomaly detected, captain.
But yeah, I think a lot of 20th Century loan words have come from American English. Hence why 'soccer' is pronounced with an American twang as "sakkaa" instead of a more English sounding "sokkaa" etc. When I was a kid, I used to think that Shockwave's name in the G1 cartoon was "Sharkwave," because the way that Americans say "shock" sounds like how we Aussies say "shark." Yes, I know his name was Shockwave from the comics, catalogues etc., but I thought that "Sharkwave" was just his Sunbow variant name, like how Jetfire became "Skyfire."

But yeah - different names, different companies, also different main focus for said companies - shouldn't cause legal problems or misunderstandings, not least because 'treasure' isn't a widely-known English word in Japan.

I'm not an IP expert, but my understanding is that you can trademark common words so long as you don't use those words in a generic sense. This is why Hasbro never uses the word "transform," but only ever "converts." Words like transform, transformers, transformation etc. are generic words, but because Hasbro has trademarked "Transformers" as a brand name, they cannot generically use any of these words in reference to the Transformers brand/products, otherwise they could lose their trademark.

I would imagine that this applies in other countries and languages. So while "takara" (treasure) is a generic word, I suspect that TakaraTOMY cannot use that word in reference to their own company.
e.g. "Kabushiki kaisha Takara-Tomy wa takaramono desu." = "Takara Tomy Co., Ltd. is a treasure."
I have no idea why they would want to say that, but yeah. Or similarly, "Hasbro, founded by the Hasbros (Hassenfeld Brothers)..."

I think that they can refer to their products as "treasures," but not the company. So I think that Hasbro can say things like, "We've transformed the market...," but they cannot label say any of the R.E.D. Series with "product does not transform." Just, "Product does not convert." When I was translating for Hasbro AU, I was always careful to translate "transform," "transformation" etc. as "convert," "conversion" etc. I even had to explain this to my Hasbro AU contact as he didn't know this.

[DELTAprime]

I totally forgot that there was a Generations toy made of Optimal Optimus until the comparison images to Legacy TM2 Megatron came out the other day. I guess I'm going to have to hit up ebay for a POTP Optimal Optimus in addition to the other figures I need to chase down before they get too expensive.

[Dan]

Recently occurred to me that the live-action Jetfire is not bent over with age, rather, he is in gerwalk mode. Maybe he's forgotten how to fully convert.

[GoktimusPrime]

griffin pointed out something to me today that I hadn't noticed... the MPG Trainbots are being released in the same order as their G1 numbers.
i.e.
C-125 Shouki
C-126 Getsuei
C-127 Yukikaze
C-128 Suiken
C-129 Seizan
C-130 Kaen

C-131 was Raiden, so I do wonder if they will release a massive (and expensive) MPG Raiden gift set later; similar to what happened with SS Devastator.

[griffin]

Two weeks ago while looking up something for Kingdom, I found out (after the entire 3 year WFC series is over ) that the logo for each series has a number imbedded into the word "War"... so Siege has "1", Earthrise has "2" and Kingdom has "3".

This was on EVERY toy box too, and I never noticed it.
Talk about hidden in plain sight...

[Ravagecat]

That's cool! Like you, never noticed it lol

[Paulbot]

How about that!

Also the next thing in that sequence would be "4/for"!

The "A" in "War" in Earthrise's logo is so wierd once you see it

[Seraphim Prime]

That's so cool.
Similarly I never noticed that.

In addition the 1, 2 and 3 and on the first, second and third letters respectively.