Nope. I live in Japan atm and enjoying my "fluent in japanese gaijin" life.
Japan is a really nice country to live in (and work, if you're a workaholic like me).
the data is the same
Edit: Might be an iTunes' decoder bug - try with some other app (on mac, vox http://coppertino.com ; on windows - foobar2000) and see if the noise persists.