Coming into port from the high seas

[dorchadas]

I've been trying to find a way to buy ebooks in Japanese for a while. At first I was using Ebookjapan.com, but they were bought out by Yahoo and their new reading app is only available on the Japanese iTunes store. It's possible to read purchases online, but that requires an internet connection and means that my usual way of reading ebook manga--on my iPad, on the train--wouldn't work unless I tethered my phone to it. And there's no way to download it using the internet.

Alright, lesson learned. Don't buy anything that's defective by design. But, I can't buy Japanese kindle books from outside Japan. What to do? Well:

1. Make a Japanese Amazon account.
   
2. Attach a US credit card. This works just fine--they'll take your money no matter where it's from.
   
3. Activate a VPN. I use the one run by the University of Tsukuba.
   
4. Buy a Kindle manga. This would have been impossible from overseas, but the VPN turns the "We cannot sell you this content" notice into the option to buy.
   
5. Download the manga after logging into Kindle with the Amazon.jp account. I did this on a separate computer from my main Amazon account, in a separate Firefox container, so there's no association.
   
6. Using Calibre and DeDRM Tools, unlock the manga.
   
7. In Calibre, convert it to PDF, the better to take notes on it for words I don't know.
   
8. Enjoy ebook manga that I now truly own.

I bought the first volume of Fruits Basket yesterday using this method, so tonight I'm going to try again and see if it still works. If it does--and I don't see why wouldn't--I'll buy more Fruits Basket, Peach Girl, Death Note, and BLAME! to practice my Japanese. And I can lend them out to other people, if they want.

Maybe they'll cut off my account at some point for whatever reason, but who cares? I own my purchases. It's mine and they can't take it from me. It's on my iPad in PDF right now.

Now to just get good enough at Japanese to read it without constantly looking things up.

Comments

[draxil]

What a palava! But worth it by the sounds of things :)

[grayswandir]

Nice! I'm envious of your Amazon-hacking skills. Hopefully they won't notice anything strange about the account, since you're not ordering anything that has to be mailed anywhere.

[dorchadas]

Just to be safe, I went and gave them my old mailing address from when I lived in Japan, so if they ever do any kind of search of it, it'll show up as real.

As you say, I'm never going to order anything physical, but that extra layer of precaution can't hurt.

[renegadefolkhero]

You may have mentioned this elsewhere, but how long have you been studying Japanese? This is purely idle curiosity, I always enjoy the language-related posts even though I do not know anything about the language and have no frame of reference.

[dorchadas]

Eleven years by the clock, but technically more like four years seriously (a year before I moved to Japan and the last three years). I was kind of doing maintenance studying for a few years after I moved back, not getting better but also not losing it. It wasn't until I hired a tutor at the end of 2015 and started playing video games in Japanese and reading a bunch of Japanese twitter and blogs that I actually started really getting better.

My whole play-through-all-of-Zelda-in-Japanese thing only started in 2016, for example.

[thestoryofdarcy]

That's som pretty impressive determination and kudos for figuring it out. I hope reading in Japanese helps you with your language learning

[omnipotent]

You clearly are very dedicated to acquiring Japanese media in its original language, because man, that sounds like a lot of hoops to jump through.

If you ever want or need a different VPN, I get to use my VPN on 10 different devices so I would be willing to share the username and password, if you want. I've been using Private Internet Access since 2013.

[dorchadas]

Oh, thank you! I'll remember that if it ever becomes necessary--I'm using a free VPN right now and it's never a given that it'll keep being available, even if it is an education project. At the moment, the free service works for me because I only use it for a few minutes at a time (log in, buy, download, log out).

I really want to read manga in Japanese for two reasons: one is that it has pictures, so it's an aid to understanding, and the second is that if I do something I already find fun, it's easier to use it to study. My Japanese ability before and after I started playing video games in Japanese is a testament to that.