Japanese imports on New Zealand shelves

How this page is built

A listing lands here when the shop’s own product text states a Japanese region (NTSC-J anywhere in the title, or the words Japanese or JPN written after it as an annotation) and we matched it to a game in our catalogue. The words have to sit in the annotation rather than the name because a game can be about Japanese without being a Japanese copy, and My Japanese Coach is not an import. We never infer region from a platform or a release year: a copy whose shop said nothing about region is left off this page rather than guessed onto it, because a missing claim is not the same as a negative one. “Never released locally” means our catalogue holds no PAL release of that game at all. That is PAL rather than New Zealand specifically, because an explicit New Zealand release signal exists on 0.21% of releases and PAL is the sharpest regional bucket the data actually carries.