I’m sorry if you don’t want foreigners commenting on your post, but as an American, I genuinely love studying and experiencing works from other cultures. Japanese culture is one of the cultures I’m particularly fascinated by, and I use Japanese media—anime, manga, games, and other works—as a way to learn more about it. That’s exactly why I have a problem with modern localization. Most Japanese companies rely on third-party localization teams to translate their works from Japanese into English. I understand that translating between two very different languages and cultures is difficult, and some adaptation is unavoidable. But there is a huge difference between translating something so the audience can understand it and rewriting it because the localization team thinks Western audiences should see something different. Too often, Japanese cultural elements are removed, changed, or replaced with something supposedly more familiar to Western audiences. Japanese terminology gets replaced. Cultural references get rewritten. Jokes and situations are changed. Sometimes something that has nothing to do with the original culture is substituted simply because the localizers think it will work better for a Western audience. And that completely defeats the purpose for people like me who are consuming Japanese media specifically because we WANT to experience Japanese culture. If I wanted everything to be filtered through Western culture, I would consume Western media. I don’t need a localization team to "fix" Japanese culture for me or replace unfamiliar Japanese elements with something they think I’ll understand better. Sometimes I actually WANT to learn what that unfamiliar term means. I WANT to understand the cultural reference. I WANT to experience the work as something that came from Japan. Localization should help bridge the language barrier—not erase the culture on the other side of it. And honestly, a lot of Western fans are getting sick of third-party, often Western-hired localization teams deciding that the original Japanese work needs to be rewritten to fit their own ideas of what Western audiences should see. We chose to consume Japanese media because we wanted something Japanese. Stop removing the Japanese parts and then calling it localization. Translate the work. Explain what needs explaining. Preserve the cultural differences. Don’t rewrite the original just because you think your audience is too ignorant, too sensitive, or too incapable of understanding another culture.