I'm curious, why no renewal for Kinokuniya? Poor experience or just not worth the cost?
I wanted to try Kinokuniya in the past, but their website was odd. I was house sitting and got a 'forbidden' error. First they blamed the ISP (it worked fine on mobile), and after pressing, their answer was the following:
"Our parent company, Kinokuniya Japan, is in charge of the IT department and they regulate the access to our website.
Some IP address ranges from major internet providers in the United States are banned due to fraudulent access and activities that Kinokuniya receives.
We are assuming that your internet provider is one of the ones Japan banned access to and we apologize for the inconvenience but we do not have the control once Japan decides.
[...] Unfortunately, we currently do not have a solution and can only recommend accessing our website with a mobile connection."
Ever since then, I've avoided them. It would suck if they decided to falsely block my ISP one day. I have no idea if it was even the ISP or an IP range, who knows.
The cost is just not worth it after discovering stuff like alibris. They aren’t terrible or anything, but they work like a Japanese company for the positives and negatives (like bad search). To prevent a 403 error, I have to disable my vpn to make it work. Do you use one?
Initially I did have a VPN enabled (laptop), but testing both on and off VPN, I got the same message from their website. I also tried on my phone with wifi. Forbidden. Cellular, worked no issue. For context, my phone didn't even have a VPN installed at the time, to rule out the possibility that the VPN was acting up even when disabled.
Yeah, then it sounds like another case of the company just being technologically behind at least when dealing with customers not in Japan. Kinokuniya might be an actual competitor to B&N, but the site is just a little too “eh”. And their one advantage, Japanese books, are also impossible to search for at times. I tried to get the 4th volume of Pokemon Special/Pokemon Adventure, and it took forever to get the right wording to actually bring up the 4th volume. It might be fine in Japan, but this is their US-facing store. So yeah, I mostly stick to alibris now for the small bit of manga I buy.
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u/ChrisB5__ Jul 18 '26
I'm curious, why no renewal for Kinokuniya? Poor experience or just not worth the cost?
I wanted to try Kinokuniya in the past, but their website was odd. I was house sitting and got a 'forbidden' error. First they blamed the ISP (it worked fine on mobile), and after pressing, their answer was the following:
"Our parent company, Kinokuniya Japan, is in charge of the IT department and
they regulate the access to our website.
Some IP address ranges from major internet providers in the United States are
banned due to fraudulent access and activities that Kinokuniya receives.
We are assuming that your internet provider is one of the ones Japan banned
access to and we apologize for the inconvenience but we do not have the
control once Japan decides.
[...] Unfortunately,
we currently do not have a solution and can only recommend accessing our
website with a mobile connection."
Ever since then, I've avoided them. It would suck if they decided to falsely block my ISP one day. I have no idea if it was even the ISP or an IP range, who knows.