(UPDATED) Visa payment suspended on legal dating site for otaku, prompting response from Japanese politician

UPDATE: On December 16 at 2:28pm, Aellune announced that the payment processor has since informed them that Visa payments will continue to be allowed on the site.

Aellune, a matchmaking service that finds marriage partners for otaku, have announced that they have had to suspend Visa payments on their website. Along with a manga archive, and various doujinshi-focused websites, it seems that Aellune has become one of the latest Japanese platforms to be impacted by international payment processor restrictions.  

According to the announcement Aellune posted on December 14, they were suddenly informed by Visa that they would no longer be able to offer the payment method on their site. This suspension will come into effect on December 16 at the earliest, or December 31 at the latest. As an alternative, Aellune are asking users to pay by domestic bank transfer, but waiving the transfer fee of 500 yen so that customers won’t have to pay more than they would have done by credit card.  

Taro Yamada, a politician in the Diet’s upper house, commented on the issue on his official X account. The House of Councillors’ member criticized the arbitrariness and the lack of transparency behind the credit card payment processor’s seemingly abrupt decision to suspend payment on Aellune. He mentions the harm that such measures do to both legal businesses and their customers, and believes that if such sudden suspensions continue, then new laws will be needed to counteract them. 

Since the beginning of this year, an increasing number of Japanese platforms have had to suspend credit card payments (particularly Visa and Mastercard) due to the tightening regulations of international payment processors. Affected sites include Skeb, Niconico, DMM, DLSite, Fantia, Melonbooks and most recently, the BL doujinshi platform pictSPACE. 

According to a statement from Visa Japan’s CEO, Cietan Kitney, the disabling of credit card payments on sites dealing with adult content (even that which is legal in Japan) is “necessary to protect the (Visa) brand.”