With appreciation to many helpful folks here who showed me how to do this, I purchased in December a RTW business class originating from Tokyo for approx Yen 713,000 (about USD 6,000): NRT - LAX - DFW - JFK - LHR - HKG NRT. I live in Hong Kong and take a trip like this several times per year. I paid for it with my HK based AMEX.

Today I booked: NRT - ORD - DFW - JFK - LHR - AMS - HKG - NRT for the same price and I received an email with my record locator number, so all good. When going to the AA website to select my seats I get a message to contact my travel agent or the AA desk, and I could not select my seats (although when logging into CX to select my seats for the CX leg (AMS - HKG), I was able to select seats).

I spoke to the AA "around the world desk" (what they call it) just now and was told that i cannot purchase the ticket unless I have a Tokyo based credit card, and that if I wanted to keep these reservations he would need to send this to the fare department for repricing, and the fee will be approximately HKD 79,360 (USD 10,000), with the newly priced ticket ready for purchase in 5 hours. Tough luck. I was lucky in Jan.

As I have already booked meetings I will go ahead with this ticket, but does anyone here have any experience with this loophole ending? The man at the desk explained to me that the website is very inconsistent and sometimes lets people do this and sometimes not. Anyone have a similar experience?

Another question, when using the oneworld on-line to originate from NRT rather than Hong Kong (as I used to do before I was shown the trick), the carrier on the first leg of my trips seems to be the ticket issuing carrier for the whole trip. So, when I fly NRT - LAX I have purchased a ticket from AA. If I flew from NRT to LHR I assume the ticket is issued by BA. Now my question: for most trips I can go either East or West provided I hit all my cities. Does anyone know if the chance of oneworld raising the issue of not having a Japan credit card vary from airline to airline. Ie, if I flew NRT - LAX with the first leg on Japan Airlines rather than AA, or decided to go NRT - LHR on BA, would this same issue be raised. While the rule is a one world rule, perhaps different airlines enforce it differently.

Any insights here, are the fun times over?

Anyone know about getting a Japan issued credit card payable in JPY? I will contact AMEX and see if they can do this for me, but I suspect I will need to show Japan residency to get one.

Any one else having this problem?