How to shop the global store

Question

I'm finding iTunes quite frustrating at the moment.  I live in the UK and like Japanese music.
Some Japanese music is a available on iTunes UK, but bands like Glay (probably best described as the U2 of Asia) isnt available, yet on ping I am able to follow  the lead guitarist.
As I understand it I can change the ITunes region, but to be able to shop Japan I would have to have a Japanese credit card.  It just seems ludicrous as im buying on the net - it must have something to do with iTunes territory profit marking.
As a consumer I just want to buy world music - does apple have a solution for this...anyone else experiencing this problem?

Answer 1

I'm answering one last time and then I'm done. From This Business of Music (10th Edition) (by M. William Krasilovsky and Sydney Shemel) (and thanks to the Mimico Kid for the reference) :
The difficulty of establishing workable business models for digital files (...) extends to where they are sold and where they are played. This is the issue of territoriality, and it is an illustration of how the Internet makes it necessary to reexamine basic assumptions that have been taken for granted (...).
(....) In the music business the primary problem is that copyrights are national and therefore specific rights are tied to national laws and the interpretations of national courts.
(.... T)hough we can one day hope to see the development of common standards with respect to copyright, the fact that the music business is building upon a history of nation-specific contractual relationships means that the goal of universal international standards is not, for the forseeable future, a practical one.
(...) Adding to the difficulty (...) the copyrights themselves may have been assigned to different companies in different territories. The best hope for a cleaner start and a simpler future is worldwide recognition that digital uses are in fact - and should be in law - totally new.
The content owners don't like cross-border sales of CDs either, but there's nothing they can do to stop such sales since laws involving resale of physical goods prevent any content owner from blocking any reseller from exporting and selling to another country. The content owners can, though, and do stop cross-border download sales, and require that any download store acquire licenses individually for each country of sale. There is nothing any download store can do about that, so they must negotiate licenses separately in each country, and that's often not possible.
No need to respond further. Apple's not listening here and I'm through with the subject.