Listen to the Rain

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.