Why do web sites think I'm in Japan?

[Michael]

Just curious, this happens sometime. Both playstation.com and wwe.com
greet me with Japanese splash screens and I have to redirect myself to
their US sites. This happens only when using Google DNS, and has
happened in both the San Francisco region and Las Vegas region.

[jtrag]

Do you possibly have a Proxy program or something setup on your
computer that it's using Proxy servers to hide your real IP address?
That's one thing that would cause this regardless of the DNS Servers
you use.

[markitossances]

Just because your browser is accidentaly configured to show webs in
Japanese as a preferent language.

Just tell me the browser and I'll help you to solve it.

[Paul S. R. Chisholm]

It's a fair question, Michael. There are a couple of things that could
be going on. Both involve geolocation, deriving your physical location
from an IP address.

If you hadn't said anything about DNS, I might have guessed that when
you visit those sites, the web servers look at your IP address and
guess your location from that. www.playstation.com resolves to the
same IP address everywhere (at least for Google Public DNS), but then
its web server redirects, for example, to us.playstation.com. (This
has nothing to do with DNS.) Do you see a redirection like that in
your browser?

Since you said it only happens with Google Public DNS, here's another
possibility. The authoritative nameservers (the ones that provide the
final answers you need) for www.wwe.com return different IP addresses
for the web site depending on the IP address they see. (This is a
pretty common thing on the Internet. Less common is that they return
different CNAME chains, sometimes using Akamai, sometimes not. If that
last sentence makes no sense to you, ignore it.) The authoritative
nameservers see the IP address of the recursive resolver (such as
Google Public DNS), not your computer's IP address.

There are potentially ways of addressing this issue:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/proposal-to-extend-dns-protocol.html

When you say this "happens only when using Google DNS": What other DNS
servers have you tried, that don't show this behavior?

Hope this helps. --PSRC