A little fly told me about this on the grapevine…

Article here

Where I heard it from

tl;dr for impatient people: It seems like some Japanese creators, game developers and them creative-types in Japan actually appreciate stuff like fan translations and fansubs.

Here’s the kicker: (and if I have to verify this, all I have to do is to email RPGamer )

On a similar note, we told Mr. Sakamoto that a fan translation had been done some years ago for Front Mission 1, and asked how he felt about such efforts. The producer replied that he actually found them very encouraging — it’s something the developers should be doing, but because they’re not, the fans are doing it instead. He stated that he’d like to be able to give something back to the fans, and would like to thank personally each of the fans that worked on the translation.

No official word on fansubs yet, but I think if we can take this article as an example, Japan does like the efforts put in by the likes of Mirror Moon and doremi-subs.

Yes, I know TYPE-MOON and some visual novel companies have this ‘no translation’ policy on their works, but it’s more due to the fact that different languages cannot adequately express their ideas, and not because they want to milk the crap out of their fans. I mean, heck, translation into a different language requires an entire shift in mindset, not just blindly machine translate.

The point is, even though sometimes the Japanese ‘officially’ say they do not like fantranslations and the like, deep down, some of them actually do like the efforts the fans put in to do this stuff.

Acknowledgments:

velocity7 (he’s the guy heading the CLANNAD Translation Project) for bringing this to my attention.
RPGamer for writing the article.