I don’t use any vpn but I do log in with my rakuten id on there. One I made on the japanese rakuten website a few years ago. Maybe that would let you get it.
So, I lucked into getting a Kobo sort of by accident just a few months ago. I’ve never bought anything from them, and actually don’t have any address on record. So I assume their basing the “Cannot buy” message on my IP, which is why I thought a VPN might help. The only place to put address into my account would be billing, but although it lists like 4000 countries, Japan is not in the drop down (in any script). Weird. And probably not a good thing to try, given your experience.
Thanks for all the help, folks, but don’t worry about it too much. I have a paper copy lying around here already. I just lucked into getting an e-reader recently. My wife left hers on a plane. We filed a lost and found, but after 30 days, assumed it’d never come back so she got a new one. Two weeks later, she got an email and they sent it back. So I got an e-reader!
Anyway, I was just piggybacking off this thread because I thought it’d be a nice experiment since tagging words to look up on paper is a big bother. But I’m not too worried about it, so don’t stress yourselves out about it. 
I haven’t had any issues with foreign IP. You probably just need to set your address to a Japanese one
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So, the reason this is the case is because the Japanese kobo store is tied to the Rakuten store. The trick is to create a rakuten ID/ 楽天ID (using a Japanese address - there are cough certain websites that will help you with this) and THEN linking your rakuten ID to the kobo account you already created. To do so go to the kobo profile and then you’ll find an option to link your profile to a rakuten ID - do the Japanese one, not the english one. Once you link the two, the country on your kobo account will magically change to Japan. Enter a japanese address and your credit card details and voilà! You can now purchase books without even using a VPN.
Random tips and tricks:
- Important: there is an international Rakuten store and a Japanese one, from what I can tell. Make sure you use the japanese one when creatin the ID, as the two are not linked. On kobo profile you want 楽天ID no Rakuten ID
- Clear you credit info and address before linking the two. Otherwise you might end up with a weird situation where you can’t change it to a Japanese address prior to purchasing
- The Japan kobo store does not take paypall, so credit card it is. If kobo is being annoying about accepting you card, however, an alternative is buying yourself a kobo giftcard (doable online) and then using the credit towards the purchase.
- Changing back to your home country store is possible (in my case, Canada), but can be annoying. You know the handy dropdown menu that lets you change country usually? Yeah, now the only option is Japan.
- So: Like before, delete all payment info and address before switching back. Then unlink your account from the Rakuten ID. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. If your account is linked to facebook or google, try unliking one of those. Sign out and then sign back in. That should prompt you to re-link your account. See if you can now switch to your native country, or if Japan is still the only option.
- If all else fails, after unlinking your account to any other ID, go to the profile and deactivate your account. I know this sounds scary, but I promise, nothing will be lost, it just makes your account dormant. Then try to sign in again. This will prompt you to re-activate your account. The address should now be reset to the default.
My suggestion: if you plan on reading both in your native language and Japanese, wait until you have a couple of titles saved and then buy them all at once. Then switch back to your native home store. Alternatively, you could have two seperate accounts. I don’t want to have to switch profiles on my ereader, so I’m fine with going through the hassle every couple of months, but YMMV. You could also use calibre to strip the DRM from the books - google can help you find the necessary plugin, and then just side load onto your normal account.
Alternatively, sometimes titles (like 地球星人) are available on the “world” store, which you can purchase from anywhere in the world. Scroll down to the last option in the country store dropdown list (the flag at the top of the store page) and click on the “other” option. Tada! More Japanese are now available. This won’t work for everything, but occasionally you’ll get lucky. Several of Murata’s titles on the world store for example. Probably have less luck with manga though. Edit turns out I accidentally bought a Chinese edition of Murata’s book. 
* so, yeah… Might not actually be a good trick.
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Because it looks like you don’t need a VPN (same for registration?) and the books can be deDRM’d easily too and because I’m always a bit afraid of Amazon just deciding to close my account one day for having to use a VPN to buy ebooks from there, I want to give the Kobo store a try.
I’m just a bit confused where/how to register an account. I guess it’s the member.id.rakuten.co.jp site I get redirected to when trying to sign up from the JP Kobo store.
But do I have to keep the regististration website in Japanese or would English work as well? The latter doesn’t require a kanji name for example (edit: though I just realized they accept latin alphabet as well, so this question is answered I guess). Would it give me a different/wrong Rakuten ID account?
Edit: It worked, was able to get 地球星人 and am now ready to read!
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