Yes, dteowner, I often see this with japanese releases as well, and I *just* don't understand it.

The only possible argument I've come up with is that they want to try to promote "western" musicians with this bonus stuff. But there's a quirk in this resoning : Japanese people will perhaps not even know that they have something the rest of the world doesn't have ? (I mean bonus tracks on CDs, for example.) Unless they do a research …

On the other hand, if this resoning would be true, we would see *lots* of unique releases of well-known Japanese artists here in the "western region", with bonus tracks and extras that aren't available in Japan … But I don't ever remember having seen this …

And this is true for all other "special releases" throughout the world as well …