Rakuten TV Livestream Guide
Hi guys, I’ve been meaning to type this up for a while but better late than never, right? 💦
To get to a Rakuten TV livestream you’ll need:
A VPN with servers in Japan (more on this later)
A credit or debit card, non-Japanese is OK. If you’ve had trouble with international purchases, make sure the payment will clear beforehand- you can always test on a 110 jpy anime episode a few days before and contact your card company if needed.
To pay at least an hour before the show starts. The payment period ends an hour before the curtain goes up, and thirty minutes before the livestream itself is available.
For this, I would recommend SoftEther (https://www.softether-download.com/en.aspx?product=softether, free and open source! You’re looking for the SoftEther VPN Client) over commercial services like ExpressVPN. I and other people have had Express/Nord/etc servers rejected. You can get around this by switching servers sometimes, but any particular service only has so many servers in Japan available. SoftEther is pretty much unusable for video streaming, but you’ll only need to be connected to log in, pay, and start the video anyways.
Connect to your VPN, and create a Rakuten Japan account:
https://grp02.id.rakuten.co.jp/rms/nid/registfwdi (English option)
Rakuten requires that your account member name and cardholder name be the same. I haven’t actually had a problem with this but better safe than sorry!
For the user contact information, you may use an address outside of Japan. Use 100-0000 as your postal code.
You can change your card information here (English)- use the “Credit Cards for use in Japan” option.
Then pay for your livestream:
Follow the big red buttons. The purchase button on your show’s page will turn green after checkout.
Return to the page up to thirty minutes before the show with your VPN on, and press play on the video. You can turn off your VPN after you’ve pressed play.
You’ll be shown this screen until a few minutes before the curtain goes up.
For a list of upcoming Takarazuka livestreams:
https://tv.rakuten.co.jp/static/takarazuka-live/
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