Browse with Japan IP address

April 27, 2008 1:43 AM by Rick Noelle

I've noticed that some of Yahoo Japan's services require that you are inside Japan.  Your IP address is checked and if it does not resolve to an address that it determines is within the country you are out of luck.  Some examples of these services are streaming Japanese baseball games and free promotional songs from Yahoo Japan's music service.  This evening I decided to do a Google search for "free proxies" and I quickly got a link to a site with a rather lengthy list.  (Edit 11/14/2008: I had found the link on the "Page1" link of Proxy 4 Free's site. Their lists seem to be updated regularly and vary a great deal. It is not always possible to find a Japan-based open proxy server.) I found an anonymous HTTP proxy in Japan and entered it into Internet Explorer (Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings.  Check the "Use a proxy server.." check box and then click Advanced.  For the HTTP setting, fill in the proxy IP and port that you found on the web site list.  Don't forget to disable this when you are done.  I typically use Firefox by the way, but the streaming baseball player requires IE).  Within a couple of minutes I was streaming a live Japanese baseball game.  Use of a proxy may prove useful in situations such as these.  I was curious where my traffic would appear to be coming from so in another tab I accessed my home web server and then took a look at the access log.  I have host name lookups enabled in Apache.  The traffic was coming from the server c-center.taisei.co.jp.  This domain is owned by a publicly traded information systems company with headquarters in Tokyo.  Who knows if they are aware of the fact that they have an open HTTP proxy.  For the record, I was only doing this as an experiment and do not condone the activity.  Also, keep in mind that if you do this, the owner of the proxy can monitor and log your traffic.