Japanese animation in Singapore

I was in Singapore the other day and noticed that the only anime that people talk about is "Naruto" and "Bleach" and whatever anime that airs on Animax (a cable/satellite channel that is headquartered in 港区 inside 東京都) and free-to-air channels. The only thing I saw on TV and the TV schedule was anime that I would consider "outdated" and "boring" (Pokemon, Prince of Tennis, Detective Conan) or where the subtitles and/or dubs spoil the anime (and maybe the video and sound quality too). If you look at "Anime I'm currently watching" at the side of this blog, you would notice that most are very new. So new that the episode mentioned there was aired in Japan less than a week ago.

I'm not sure if I have mentioned this earlier (could be on my Windows Live Spaces or Yahoo! 360 blog, not sure where) but there is only 1 distributer (Obdex or something like that) for anime and the quality (packaging, media used, video & audio quality, subtitles, language channel) is bad. Also, unless you look at certain branches of specialized stores (normally inside the large branches / located in a major shopping district), the manga found in Singapore are either English or Chinese translated versions and not the original ones. Note: The page ordering for the English verison is most likely to be reversed from the Japanese/Chinese verison. Name ordering is also reversed: Family name followed by given name. (Strangely enough, Chinese and Korean names are left unchanged unless they have a western name, in which the order could be: western given name followed by surname and then the given name in hanyu pinyin)