Swapping between Amazon Japan and Amazon UK on your Kindle

README.md

This guide is aimed at people outside of Japan (I use UK for the sake of discussion) trying to learn Japanese by reading Kindle books, or vice versa. This approach may well work for other Amazon regions, though it should be noted that to my understanding, Amazon Japan is a special case amongst the regions (I believe it's a separate business entity from typical Amazon regions in ways that the other regions aren't) and therefore may work somewhat differently.

How to switch Kindle between Amazon accounts

Once your Kindle is registered to your Amazon UK account, you must deregister that account before registering the Amazon Japan account.

Any time you switch accounts, your downloaded library will be cleared. By that, I mean that your downloads will be deleted from disk – but you are still entitled to redownload whichever purchases are associated with your currently-registered account. Rest assured that any manually-added files (PDFs that you've added via file transfer, for example) will not be cleared when switching Amazon accounts, as they're not Cloud products and not coupled to any particular account.

Even if this may have been the case in the past, at the time of writing (April 2022), there is no way to keep both Amazon UK and Amazon Japan books side-by-side in your Kindle's downloaded library, as any downloaded purchases are cleared when switching accounts, as mentioned above.

How to buy Amazon Japan products when residing outside of Japan

Note that this is all from the perspective of someone buying digital products. I suppose if you want to buy physical products, you can do that with this method, but picking up the goods is another question. Some companies offer a service where you can ship to their designated address and they'll ship onward to your international address, so that's one option. Anyway:

1. Make an Amazon Japan account, using an email address that is distinct from any email address you've used for an Amazon UK account.
2. Register a Japanese address. No verification is made of the address (except presumably standard address validation like validity of postcode)
3. Register your payment card of choice, which can be a UK card (see next section for details on billing address). Best to use a travel-oriented one to avoid foreign exchange fees.
4. Purchase a Kindle book whilst connected to a VPN with an IP in Japan.

For subsequent purchases, the VPN isn't always necessary (it's an occasional check), but for the initial purchase, it is. Turning it on convinces their system that you're resident in Japan. For subsequent purchases, it seems it accepts that you may simply be temporarily on holiday, but as mentioned, evidently there is some length of time after which they require proof of residency via IP.

A note on the billing address for your card

Note that, although one uses the same Amazon account across amazon.co.jp and audible.co.jp (and thus the same set of cards), only amazon.co.jp seems to accept the usage of cards with a UK billing address. For example, if you add a Monzo debit card to your amazon.co.jp wallet:

• ... and select a Japanese billing address, then that card successfully registers and appears in your virtual wallet on both amazon.co.jp and audible.co.jp.
• ... and select a UK billing address, then that card successfully registers and appears in your virtual wallet on amazon.co.jp... but not on audible.co.jp. If you reattempt the card registration on audible.co.jp, you'll notice that it does not let you select any country other than Japan for the billing address.

Again, in my experience, not only is there no verification of shipping address, there's also no verification of billing address. So payments should work fine on audible.co.jp even if the billing address registered is not the real billing address for the card.

Update

I'd had an account associated with amazon.co.jp from 6 years ago. It was associated with the very same email address that I'd used for amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

I logged into the amazon.co.jp account and decided to:

• change the email to one distinct from my .co.uk and .com accounts;
• remove the UK-based address that I had associated with the account and replace it with a genuine Japanese one that I'd lived in in the past, associating it with a genuine Japanese phone number I'd used in the past;
• register my Monzo card, associating it with my UK address.

Now I logged out, and this time I connected to a Japanese VPN. It made me perform a CAPTCHA upon this login attempt, but I had no problems buying a light novel for Kindle, selecting my Monzo card for payment.

Deregistering one Kindle account and registering another is totally painless. Aside from the time it takes to type in your email address and password, there is only a loading process of about 30 seconds as it removes downloads from the deregistered account.