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Dōjinshi Mail-Order Service pictSPACE to Halt Visa, Mastercard Payments on January 1
posted on by Joanna Cayanan
The policy change will affect payments for items ordered on pictSPACE and on pictSQUARE (a tie-in service for hosting online market events). The company GMW administers these services which feature boys-love (BL) and other genres.
Payment methods still available on pictSPACE include JCB, American Express, and Diners Club credit cards, the Paidy payment service, and bank transfer.
Over the past two years, numerous sites and services in Japan have had to disallow payments from various services such as Visa and Mastercard, due to customer payments being refused through those services. Such sites include, but are not limited to: Nico Nico, Melonbooks and Toranoana, DLSite (which also disallowed American Express), Fantia, Manga Library Z, and Fanza.
Cietan Kitney, President of Visa Worldwide Japan, confirmed that while Visa wants to make its payment service available to legal and legitimate products and services as much as possible, it may sometimes decline purchases to "protect the brand." Kitney was responding to a question about the recent spate of credit card companies refusing to process payments for sites and services that may carry adult content (legal in Japan), during a Q&A session in the company's briefing about its expansion efforts in Osaka last November.
Source: pictSPACE website via Hachima Kikō
