Quote Originally Posted by DELTAprime View Post
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.