Goodbye Doraemon Train

[RapitBunny]

Saw this posted on my anime news site...I'm kind of surprised Odakyu Electric Railway isn't allowed to file the proper permits retroactively if the government officials were going to pull this kind of stuff.  Or maybe the permits are too expensive for it to be worth it to them.  :(

 

Odakyu Electric Railway announced on Thursday that it will no longer have a train decorated with Doraemon and other manga characters due to Tokyo's ban on large outdoors advertising. Starting in October, the service will instead run a train with a standard paint scheme on the line currently served by the "Odakyu F-Train."

 

The line began service on August 3 to celebrate the September 3 opening of the Fujiko F. Fujio Museum. However, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government contacted Odakyu since it considered the train's manga illustrations as advertising for the museum. The government explained that the train violated the law on outdoors advertising that exceeds a standard size without a permit application.

 

Odakyu said that the law violation was unintentional, and it apologized to its customers and those involved for the inconvenience.

 

Sources: Sports Nippon, 47 News

[cteno4]

oh what a bummer. blow for painted trains. i wonder if the permitting will start reducing the number of painted trains... that would be sad.

 

jeff

[Kabutoni]

That's strange. Wouldn't it be obvious if one uses licensed characters on a commercial product, it would all be worked out legally. Looks like even in Japan things like these don't work out or it was some kind of guerilla tactic, which would explain the sloppy planning from Odakyu.

[KenS]

It sounds more like a city ordinance issue than a licensing issue.  Tokyo is full of ads, but perhaps the city gets a fee for every one of them, and the railroad thought they could avoid it since they weren't advertising a product.  Given a choice of paying a high fee, or removing the ads they, or the museum, made the choice not to spend money.  Of course I'm just guessing.

 

There's a Daily Yomiuri article on it which makes it sound like Tokyo limits maximum ad size on the exterior of trains.  Which makes me wonder how train wraps like the "chocolate Yamanote train" work at all. I suspect there's more to this than a simple matter of permission.

 

It could also be simple bureaucracy and what would be fine if they filled out the right form wasn't because they didn't, but that seems overly simplistic.

[Nozomi4ever]

 

But somehow this one is successful.. Not sure why..

[linkey]

cause it is on a plane and not a mobile billboard of a train. It's all some red tape issue I would say by the local gov. but saying that it will be sad for it to go, unless some common sense comes into play and be about to keep it running and would this be a issue for the pokemon trains in the future?