Asia and Japan PS2 machines' difference

in anticipation of vf4's arrival on PS2..i have made up my mind to purchase a set. I went to the video game store to find 2 versions of PS2..one citing for Asia and one for Japan. the Asia one costs Sing dollar 466..while jap is about 600++
i was in a rush for time.so i did not ask for details. anyone knows the difference between the 2 in terms of game play or hardware compatibility(like diiferent regions of DVD??)
thanks

 

I've heard of Sony having plans to make region-0 Asian PS2 systems (ie no region encoding) but I'm not totally sure. My recently acquired unit is a region-2 Japanese model, even though it was shipped from a supplier in Hong Kong... so...