>>1889959The original Japanese version setting (Tomoeda) clearly takes place in Japan, there's no question about that.
The English dub version (Reedington), on the other hand, attempts to push it to being a western world location and enforces that by changing the name of the characters and setting locations. The remaining Japanese text that were left untouched you were expected to toss out as "foreign language" entities.
As for the NY Times article, what they fail to mention is that Cardcaptors was a sabotage attempt to wanting to appeal to a younger audience and in the process of doing that, failed horrendously. The DVDs for both Cardcaptor Sakura with English subtitles and Cardcaptors were released at the same time, and yet because Cardcaptor Sakura outsold Cardcaptors, they were forced to stop selling Cardcaptors a year earlier.
