[Electronic M]

What surprises me is that Japanese collectors aren't on this forum and other American forums using us as a resource to purchase Japanese made US market TVs... There's still a good number of surviving sets across the US, both Japan and the US use NTSC (yeah there's only workable channel overlap on the upper half of VHF and probably UHF) so compatibility with their local standards would be fairly good, and there were many cosmetically (if not also electrically) unique Japanese made US only models.

As a collector of primarily American TVs (the number of Japanese sets I have is pretty good too), part of me sees stuff like European adapted American GE portacolors, PAL Demodulator Hybrid Zeniths in the hands of foreign collectors and thinks "I'd like to import one of those to the states"..... There ought to be someone in the Japanese TV collector community who at least has had a version of that thought with regards to Japanese export models in foreign countries cross their mind.

One thing that I do somewhat understand is the service literature thing. I believe they're very serious about copyright over there. Granted, it seems a little bit odd to care about it on something as obsolete, low monitary value, and niche as much of what we're into collecting is.
Once the OEM no longer is capable of supplying the service documents necessary to maintain something it becomes an important duty of the collector community to preserve that documentation and prevent its total loss... Often the most effective way of preserving documentation is to make it findable and available. If one collector has it and dies then that literature is probably lost, but if 10 collectors have a piece of literature and one dies there's still 9 copies out there.