tl;dr? Then just check the bold and skip to the end.
What I did say was that somebody who says they are moving to America for Moulin Rouge had damn well better be doing it for a career in theater and not because they want to live in "glorious America, the land of Broadway."
And what I was saying is that you don't need to have a career in theater in order to sustain a fandom of Broadway.
Though you may not have intended it this way, by saying that someone who moves to America for Broadway "had damn well better be doing it for a career in theater", you imply that conversely, someone who does not have a career in theater
should not move to America for Broadway. All I'm doing is marking a very nuanced difference in the choice of words:
You don't need to live in America to be a fan of Broadway musicals (your words, verbatim), but you
can still live in America if only as a fan of Broadway musicals,
even if theater is not your career. However if that's the case, you should recognize that there are additional challanges that you will have to meet, and it is up to an educated person to decide
whether having a front row seat is worth the price of admission.
A fan of manga can easily import. It's much cheaper and safer [...] to import and stay put than to pack up, move to Japan, look for a new job, etc. all for the sake of manga purchasing power. The anime equivalent would to attending Broadway would probably be Comiket. [...] if you find yourself flying to every single Comiket [...] and you wake up one day and realize that nothing's holding you back, then yeah, you ought to move to Japan [...] And then you could go to Akiba every weekend. You could really immerse yourself in anime nerd culture.
But I think that somebody who moves to NYC because he is obsessed with Broadway is unreasonably obsessed with Broadway. Ditto for our hypothetical otaku who wants to move to Japan to become Akihabara's newest gaijin regular.
I'm not going to argue about how easy you think it is to obtain manga overseas (that
really requires all sorts of tedious qualifications). What I will say is that there's a wide lattitude to what is considered "fandom" (from a casual fan to a diehard fan). All fans can get access to a large variety of manga wherever they may be in the world.
But fans in Japan have access to special/limited/signed editions, rare prints, first copies; they are able to attend large and small scale events; they can join circles and clubs, have a greater chance of meeting people who share similar tastes; and so on. "Packing up, moving to Japan, looking for a new job, etc" is indeed a big challange, but to some those are just minor/temporary problems compared to having direct access to all things anime/manga. Of course if it's
only for Comiket, it's hard to justify anything more than a week-long vacation. But Comiket is just one part of a much larger subculture, so just how much it's worth will depend on one's level of fandom.
You raise an additional suggestion that there is a limit of fandom that is considered acceptible, beyond which you consider "unreasonable obsession". All I can say is that if you choose to pass that kind of judgment, that's your business, and
yours alone (not fact).
My overarching point is that for anyone who wants to consider moving to Japan (or anywhere, really), it is important to be realistic about that kind of commitment.
But being realistic does not mean you have to be negative or pessimistic about your goals.
What I sense in this discussion with regard to the anime assumption is a gut "negative" reaction based on the stigma of
otaku subculture, that of a stereotypical Japanese nerd who whittles away time reading manga, has poor hygeine, low work-ethic, social problems, and so on. My gut reaction is to argue against that, because those traits describe
NEET and
hikikomori classifications -- both of which are smaller groups of people, and not exclusive to otaku (some otaku are NEET/hiki, but most are not).
The reality is that anime/manga fans come from all walks of life, and there is nothing about the lifestyle of an otaku that is inherently unsustainable (at least beyond individual circumstantial differences).
For your other points, they're mostly on-target; the only corrections I would make are these:
- Wanting to do extensive research in a Japan-related field is
not a good reason to want to move to Japan -- it's a
great reason.
- Wanting to move to Japan for anime/manga is not a
bad reason (per se), nor is it a necessarily
good reason; what's important for most people is that it isn't the
only reason.
- Wanting to move to Japan because you want to have sex with Japanese women is similarly neither good nor bad; it's technically true your odds are improved (than, say, if you live in Nebraska where there probably are no Japanese), but again it shouldn't be your
only reason.
- However, wanting to move to Japan because you can't get laid at home and you believe Japanese women worship foreigners (and therefore would guarantee you sex)
is a bad reason.
To put it together: wanting to move to Japan for its anime/manga/otaku culture is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. But if in doing so a person
completely neglects all the other things they have to worry about (climate, money, food, shelter, social, job, etc),
then it becomes a terrible decision. However you can say that about
anything! -- even moving to Japan to do academic research can be a bad decision if you completely neglect all other factors. It's not something exclusive to anime/manga.
There
are a lot of foreign otaku who
would foolishly move to Japan for anime/manga without considering the challanges they would face, but
anime/manga itself is not the reason why it would be a bad idea. So my purpose with regard to OP was to note that distinction: provide information about the challanges that OP wanted to know more about, but not in the way that insults his interests and suggests that he should just give up.
