Japanese Streaming

Ask someone outside Japan to name a Japanese streaming service and you’ll hear “Netflix Japan… Crunchyroll?” — which is funny, because neither is what people in Japan actually open after dinner. Japan has its own ecosystem of streaming services, several of them completely free, most of them barely known overseas, and almost all of them geo-blocked. I live in Japan, so this is the insider’s map: what each service is, what it’s for, and what it takes to watch from abroad. ...

Most VPN reviews are written by people who installed the app last Tuesday to hit a publishing deadline. This one is different: I paid for NordVPN for about six years, used it almost daily for a long stretch of that, and eventually cancelled it — not because it failed me, but because my life changed. That’s the most honest vantage point a reviewer can have: no axe to grind, no honeymoon glow. ...