why has japanese music failed to expand globally?

to be more thoughtful for a moment, don’t bother getting into japanese music if you have any interest in attending live events as a foreigner. the process is not only cumbersome because of regulatory hurdles and the usual lottery entries you’ll likely encounter (fanclubs abound), but because pretty much every major ticketing service is actively trying to lock you out by design. all of the major players like eplus, l-tike and pia at this point require some form of SMS verification at varying frequencies for accounts, which itself is pretty much a non-starter for most of us because ad-hoc SIMs don’t work with international roaming and aren’t even really supposed to be registered to anyone that can’t prove residency. l-tike quite notoriously will shadowban accounts with their labyrinth of tripwires designed to catch gaijin, so the general ticketing flow for an l-tike event usually involves trying a few times to register for event, realizing that your account has been shadowbanned, and then turning around with a scrubbed browser cache to make another fresh account. accessing your account with an overseas IP is the most likely way you’ll burn it, even if you’re careful enough to rotate through VPNs. you might, though, accidentally input your name in half width romaji instead of full width kana, or discover that the hotel or forwarding service address you set is now blacklisted, or that you forgot to put your japanese SIM in your phone when accessing the l-tike app. oh, did I mention that you’ll probably need to be in the country to pay at a conbini kiosk, or pray that your amex or discover cards happen to work because the JCB network likes whatever BIN numbers they have?

most recently, eplus wanted to force me to apply for an event through my phone because they’ve now transitioned pretty much fully to digital tickets, which require a smartphone to receive. instead, I opened my browser’s dev tools and forced a mobile user agent and viewport. japanese web dev can’t crush my eventing spirit, except maybe if a service is down for maintenace in the hours where I’m actually awake to use it, like pia is at the time I’m writing this post. servers still need their sleep in the land of the rising sun, apparently.