How do regions work for XBLA?

Question

So I have a Japanese Xbox 360 and, after changing the console's language to English, it's deceptively identical to an American one. But the 360's region locked for disks, and I'm not really sure how this matters for XBLA content.

Basically, how can I purchase downloadable games on a Japanese NTSC J Xbox 360? I have an American Xbox Live account, which I assume will cause problems--when logged in to my US account and attempting to access ingame DLC menus I get a blank menu. If I made and played on a JP account could I get these DLCs? Do I need to buy games from the Japanese store and do I need to use a JP account to do that?

Answer 1

I found some info here and tried it on my console.

It's surprisingly simple, just go to https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx and sign up normally but set your country/region to Japan. It needs a postal code so I used 112-0001 which is apparently a Tokyo postal code.

After doing this, download the profile to your 360 and it should work just fine. the UI will (partially) switch over to Japanese while you're signed in to this account, and you'll be using the Japanese Xbox Live store. I haven't worked out what to do for payment yet, but you can download Japanese demos to the Japanese xbox and they play, even from a US IP address. Did not need a Japanese proxy at any point.