Japanese manga and game store Melonbooks becomes the latest Japanese platform to run into trouble with international payment processors 

Melonbooks, a Japanese platform that sells independently published manga (doujinshi), video games and anime Blu-rays, suddenly announced on November 18 that it will be suspending Mastercard and Visa payments. They are the latest in a series of Japanese content platforms to be impacted by the tightening regulations of international payment processing companies. 

Although Melonbooks’ official announcement does not give a reason for this decision, it is likely that they received a request to remove adult content. International payment processors have been tightening their regulations lately, to avoid situations in which their money transfer networks are used in the monetization of illegally produced sexual content and/or content depicted sexual acts involving minors.  

This has had a big impact on Japanese sites offering legal fanart and doujinshi manga. So far this year, Skeb, Niconico, DMM, DLSite and Fantia have been among the sites that have had to disable Visa and Mastercard payments. Earlier this week, Manga Library Z, an online archive of out-of-print manga, announced that it was shutting down after 14 years because it had lost its primary forms of payment and could not sustain itself (related article). 

This latest announcement about Melonbooks has prompted concerns on Japanese social media that the regulations enforced by payment processors are unfairly impacting self-published manga artists and fanart creators. Melonbooks describes itself as “the one-stop shop for all doujinshi products, including manga, novels, music, video games and more.”

From December 19, Melonbooks’ customers will no longer be able to pay with Mastercard or Visa when ordering from the online site. However, they will still be able to use JCB and American Express for now. Melonbooks hopes to get Visa and Mastercard payments re-enabled at its brick-and-mortar stores but it has no plans to try to reinstate them on its online shop. To counter this, Melonbooks will be offering a workaround whereby online shoppers can pay in-store.