not kobo, rakuten books. apparently those are 2 different sites. Kobo (https://www.kobo.com/jp/ja) is region locked, rakuten books (https://books.rakuten.co.jp/) is not. 
at least that’s how it is for me.
Though it’s always possible something has changed. I haven’t used it this year yet.
I was using Rakuten when I had those issues. Wouldn’t shock me if they were testing the waters with region locking, or if there was some asinine reason for the specific books I bought to be region locked (Bookwalker does this with adult content but I promise I wasn’t buying smut 
)
I did a test. I tried to buy a book just now using my normal VPN settings (America, wherever) and got this page:
But then I noticed my VPN was set to Houston, TX which was a location I remember previously getting blocked on non-Japanese sites for. So I switched it to Chicago and suddenly I was let through.
I think someone has been up to no good on the Texas IP and it’s on a bad list somewhere. 
じ━(ㅍ_ㅍ)━･･･あやしい
I just hope ppl don’t abuse stuff too much, so I can keep getting my epubs, when I need them. ._.
I just bought all 30 volumes of 本好き out of fear I won’t be able to load them on ttu
Shame the series isn’t done yet! Would suck to have all but a few volumes downloaded!
Also, there are 31 volumes published so far. 
Goddamnit
Thanks!
【小説31巻】本好きの下剋上～司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません～第五部「女神の化身Ⅹ」 (TOブックスラノベ) will be auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle Cloud Reader. You can go to your device to start reading.
At the speed I’m going with this series I think they will have time to crack/decrypt or find an alternative store
I get things mostly on Bookwalker, but also Amazon JP / Audible JP. Until recently, I’ve preferred Bookwalker bc Amazon got weird on me when I signed up for Kindle Unlimited. Using a VPN seems to solve that. Edit: for manga I use whatever’s cheaper.
Bookwalker often has crazy deals, but Kindle Unlimited has good ones too, and the app is a much nicer reading experience than Bookwalker app (Bookwalker desktop is even worse). So for LNs, I’m planning to stick with Amazon, in the future. Edit: while Kindle app’s UI/UX is nicer, I find Bookwalker’s (Android) integration of Google Translate a lot more useful than Amazon’s dictionary lookup, which doesn’t deal well with non-dictionary form. I still sometimes paste into a separate dictionary app, just to verify. Otoh one thing that’s nice about Kindle app is the easy integration of JP->JP dictionary. I hear on iOS that Bookwalker has actual dictionary integration.
I only read on my phone, so DRM stuff hasn’t been relevant for me.
I use old versions of Kindle for PC and Android with deDRM in Calibre and can confirm that 2023 releases don’t work. Probably because these new books come as multiple .kfx files rather than a single .azw3? I have no experience with the workaround using an actual Kindle e-ink device, though!
Also I’m not sure if this would make things less of a hassle for you, but on Amazon JP when you use a gift card as your only payment method you don’t need to do it through a VPN and all that. So once in a while I buy myself a digital gift card for as much money as I can spare at the time (which does require a VPN but my US-based bank debit card and billing address work) and then whenever I buy a book I just use the gift card balance.
I use Bookwalker. It’s fantastic, and they have a tone of temporary free manga.
We need to find an IBM 5100, this is the real key to DeDrm 
Just heads up, if you google it, it seems like there’s been some advancements with the new 2023 KFX format
Not sure how long it will last, so if you had been unable to process some books, this might be your chance 
Ooooh. Unfortunately I don’t know if I can take advantage; my setup is some janky Linux “everything installed is as early a version as possible”. Thanks for the heads up though!
You can actually find some Japanese ebooks on Amazon US (or other countries) as well. This would avoid the need to switch accounts on your Kindle devices.
However, it might be a bit difficult to navigate as there could be many low-quality AI generated books in the catalog.
Some titles that I’ve found:
I know that it could be easier to purchase books on Bookwalker, but I heard that it would be hard to use the Bookwalker app on an e-ink device.
Recent further restrictive actions by Amazon made me convert my entire library to ePub so that they can’t pull it away from me overnight.
I read through the thread, thanks to everyone who has already contibuted. Initially it looks like Kobo might be my new home, but I’d appreciate if any current customer could share any possible downsides? I initially made a Rakuten Books account and then logged in with that to Kobo. It seems to support PayPal for purchases.
How has the DRM situtation been – at least on the reader front the devices seems a bit more open than Kindle out of the box?
BookWalker is my main platform for manga, but I’ve started regretting that decision – I’m pretty sure comics would also be better on e-ink than on screen. For “real” books BookWalker’s DRM seems like the worst one out of all to circumvent.
The main thing I need is the ability to either directly download or convert to ePub – I still use the training wheels provided by https://reader.ttsu.app/ and my browser extensions for looking up & mining vocabulary.
One avenue I’m now researching is jailbreaking my Kindle Scribe and installing KOReader on it. Especially for easier books where I only have to do the occasional lookup e-ink is nicer than screen and it seems like KOReader has nice plugins for J-J dictionaries and Anki mining.
I’m also thinking of making this same switch to Rakuten/Kobo ebooks, so I don’t have any insight but I’m also following the thread.
I have a bunch of Kindle devices (prime day plus added “features” like the ability to do dark mode that should just be accessibility options 
kept getting me), so I’m not really in the market for a new e-reader, and I refuse to read novels on my phone, tablet, or PC screen so that puts Bookwalker out for anything but manga.
If this Kobo storefront adventure pays off, I might be in the market for their newish Kobo Libra Colour. I kind of want to see how well colours work with e-ink.
Kindle → Kindle Paperwhite → Kindle Voyage → Kindle Scribe has been eReader route so far, with the older ones given away to family members with each purchase — now I wish I had jailbroken them first. 
Apart from being very tied to the Amazon ecosystem, the ease of use and utility provided has so far kept me a loyal customer.
I took a brief look at Booklive, but unfortunately their app doesn’t seem to be available in European App Stores at all. Honto and eBookJapan are the two alternatives I haven’t yet reserached at all.
Alright, first two test purchases done (薬屋のひとりごと 6&7).
Rakuten Books and Kobo are actually two separate sites, as stated earlier in the thread. They have a different UI and a very different flavor – it seems like Rakuten Books is the main one for Japanese audience, with Kobo being a barebones “global” implementation without much of anything going on in the terms of sales, campaigns, promotions etc.
I’ve grown accustomed to dealchasing via BookWalker, so Rakuten Books looked better for me. It accepted my Finnish Visa without any problems. However, when I was trying to complete a purchase, the site insisted on supplying a phone number before letting me complete the purchase – and of course the frontend validation stuff only accepts Japanese numbers, despite there clearly being an option for 外国 residential address (and that being completely OK).
There is a site online with valid, working Japanese SMS numbers that works much like 10minutemail.com. I entered one such number in fear of this actually verifying the phone number with a confirmation of some sort. However, this proved unnecessary, as there is no SMS validation. So why the hell did you have to even ask?? I later edited my phone number to 070 000 0000. It passed validation.
Great! Onward to buying the book. Zero hassles here. However, the book comes with Kobo’s own DRM and despite some reports to the contrary, there is no option to download the DRM’d file directly from the website (this would apparently be the case with no DRM & some Adobe DRM files).
Next problem: the official desktop app only supports Windows & Mac. I mainly use Linux. It’s unfortunately downright horrible in terms of features, and doesn’t even support retina screens on macOS – what was the last Apple laptop without retina? Something way over 10 years ago, I reckon… Still, via the same kind of tooling I’ve been using for Kindle, I managed to remove the DRM and ended up with an ePub that is indistinguishable from the ones I bought from Amazon earlier. Success.
I decided to give the same process a go on the Kobo storefront. PayPal worked just fine, didn’t even need a credit card. Otherwise the process was very similar: no download button in library, had to download to the app. That file also came out OK.
For some reason the file sizes are around ~10MB for books from Kobo, where Kindle books of the same series come out at around ~2.5MB per book. I wonder what’s the difference… higher resolution images?
So, now I have a way to continue buying books, although with some annoying extra steps with the desktop app. On the other hand, at least I don’t need to juggle two accounts as I had to with Amazon.
I guess having a Kobo reader would make all of this just a little better.
This is actually why I stopped using Rakuten some time ago - they removed that feature. I switched to Bookwalker which is manageable through means I will not discuss publicly as it iirc could make it difficult for Brandon to maintain his affiliate links via Amazon and others (since they frown on anti-DRM conversations).
Since you seem to have a process sorted though I’ll leave it at that 
