Racism is word that now means someone who dissagrees with a socialist, it lost its real meaning long ago when left whingers inserted it into every debate they thought they were in danger of losing! As you say don't bother to type, because you cannot stand people to have an opinion different to your own. It's the socialists who are the real haters & the enemies of freedom & freedom of speech!
Having worked for a Japanese company I know a little about the business model, and it's not always pretty. I do not accept that this has anything to do with the earthquake, it's to do with problems on the manufacturing line being passed to the customer, many other companies would have absorbed that cost.
What the hell does this have to do with socialism? If anybody's anti-business in this thread, it's you. You seem to have an irrational hatred for companies selling products at a price they can actually make money at. It's like crazy people protesting against Target because their mispriced $70 iPad purchases were refunded.
It also seems that I should not have bothered putting in the words "unintentionally" and "borderline" because you're getting more and more racist by the second. "I worked with lots of black people and came to know their inferior ways..." is essentially what you're saying.
I don't really care what you think, Flake, about Canon revising their lens prices upwards, and neither does anybody else.
This may have just been the result of the fluctuating exchange rate. Near the end of March, the dollar to yen ratio spiked at around 85 yen to the dollar, and now it's back down around 79. But my guess is as good as anybody's; we don't have any insider information at the moment. I haven't found an official press release about the lens price increases, and the only source I know of is on the Canon Rumors page.
The January price spike was announced by Canon USA as being put into place by them. All those terrible Japanese people working at Canon USA!
What matters here is that the lenses are going to become more expensive, and how that impacts buyers matters. It may make people shy away from these lenses, and I wouldn't blame them since they were expensive to begin with. But on the other hand it's not clear to me how big these increases are, since I don't have the old figures to compare these with. The 8-15mm fisheye zoom price, for example, looks pretty much like I remember it having looked.