On August 25, a group of executives, bureaucrats, and risk managers sat in a confidential meeting room somewhere in Japan to discuss why some people who make comics and games can no longer get paid.
The meeting wasn’t on the official calendar. You won’t find a press release. But according to Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Taro Yamada, it happened. And the people who showed up represented the international financial bottleneck that now determines which legal businesses are allowed to function.
“We held an inner meeting of the Film Industry Strategy Promotion Research Group to discuss the credit card issue,” Yamada posted on X.
“We gathered international brands, acquirers, payment processing companies, merchants, relevant government agencies, and others to freely and openly discuss the causes of the situation that can be described as financial censorship, specific solutions, and other matters.”
Yamada described the gathering as “frank” though it was conducted under a confidentiality agreement.
Yamada came away feeling optimistic.
“Under the condition that specific attendees and details would be kept confidential to facilitate frank opinion exchange, we conducted straightforward discussions. The perceptions of the stakeholders from their respective positions became much clearer, marking significant progress. We will continue to address the resolution of credit card issues.”
In other words, a handful of companies with global financial influence were brought together to explain why they keep cutting off payment processing to legal Japanese creators. No public explanation, no record, no specifics, but we’re told progress was made.
The problem isn’t a new one, but it’s grown louder.
Platforms that distribute manga, adult games, and independently produced fiction have spent the past few years quietly disappearing from payment networks.
The issue doesn’t come from the Japanese government. It comes from the payment stack, the maze of card brands, processors, acquiring banks, and opaque “compliance partners” who get to decide what kinds of lawful content should be flagged.
Last month, Mastercard insisted it had nothing to do with it. After a wave of games were delisted from platforms like Steam and Itch, the company released a statement on August 1.
That version of events didn’t match what publishers had already experienced.
The terms of the warning were never public. There was no explanation for who selected the flagged keywords, how the review was conducted, or what the content violated. The only detail that mattered was the deadline. Delete the material, or lose access to Mastercard, VISA, and the rest of the global payment web.
Yamada has built his reputation around defending financial freedom and opposing censorship. He has criticized major payment processors like Visa and Mastercard for using internal compliance programs to pressure platforms into restricting legal content, warning that such practices are nothing more than financial censorship.
In 2024, he even traveled to Visa’s headquarters in San Francisco to challenge the overreach into lawful transactions involving Japanese citizens and creators.
Yamada has also campaigned for legal reforms to protect expression in manga, anime, and digital content.
There’s still no official record of what was said in that closed-door meeting on August 25. But the stakes are clear enough. A handful of foreign companies are shaping the boundaries of lawful expression in Japan, not through legislation, but through payment systems.
And unless that changes, creators will keep losing their livelihoods, with no explanation and no recourse.
