Has he any portuguese or brazillian roots or descendence? If not, it's quite remarkable that he learned it. It's the second person I've ever heard who decided to learn that language... If he wants, I can send this or some other manga as well, or anything else he might like to read, like local magazines.

That's because the S sounds like a Z in portuguese, unless there are two S. So "Brasil" in portuguese sounds like "Brazil", but with a more open "AH" sound. To keep consistence, the name is spelled with a Z in some countries. In japanese, it's BURAJIRU.

Uh... suggestion to Jay, if he's reading this. I'm sure it's too late now, but we could have a unicode database for the forum, so we could post stuff in japanese or arabic or other languages characters.