Buying from Japan when Overseas

[Jade]

There's going to be two main topics in this thread:

• Buying Japanese Kindle books from Amazon.co.jp
• Buying physical items from Japanese websites with a shipping service

First thing's first: you're going to need Hola Unblocker (also available for Firefox), which will make any website you visit think you're in whatever country you like. If you have any issues with this, give me a PM and I'll talk you through it.

[Jade]

You're going to need a Japanese address for this, but you can use any address you like. Personally, I use my old university address, but some people use the addresses of hotels, and youth hostels. 

What else you'll need:

• Credit card
• A Kindle or Kindle program for an iDevice, Windows, Mac

You need to create an Amazon Japan account and link a previously unregistered Kindle device to it. If you have a Kindle already registered to the account, you need to go into your Account Settings -> Manage My Kindle and change your Kindle's country to Japan rather than your own.

From here, you're going to be using Hola Unblocker which has a Japan option available under countries. While you can buy some books from the Japanese Kindle store without doing this, you're likely to be caught out for buying while overseas and they'll stop you from getting even the free books.

Once all of this is sorted, you can just search for whatever books you like and hit the 'Buy with One Click' button, or if you want to try a free sample hit the 今すぐ無料サンプルを送信 button, and they should go straight to your Kindle device/app.

[Jade]

Getting Japanese products sent to you can be a hassle especially when the website refuses to ship overseas. Thankfully, there are shipping services available to help you with this.

What a shipping service does is buy the product for you within Japan, and then sends the item to you from their warehouse. This involves you paying for the item, the shipping cost to the service, and the shipping cost to yourself (+processing costs) so it can get a little pricey, but it's worth it if Amazon won't ship you that device you've wanted for so long.

One popular service is FromJapan, and you can actually bid in online auctions through this service as well. It offers services with Yahoo!Japan Auctions, Amazon.co.jp, Rakuten, Bidders, ZozoTown, AKB48 Official Shop, and 7Net. You can also send them links to products on other websites, and they will work to get those products for you as well.


Or you can just ask a friend to get it for you once you transfer some money to them. Whatever works lol

[Jade]

So, for those of you considering buying stuff (or not): 

• If you were going to get books what would you get?
• Are there any Japanese books you've desperately wanted to try your hand at reading someday?
• What other shipping services do you know/can recommend?
• What would you buy if you had the money?

[Bokusenou]

Great guide Jade!

For buying books and manga my favorite site is www.kinokuniya.com, but this only works for countries they do business in (unless you pay international shipping), of which the US and Australia are the only English speaking ones.

www.yesasia.com is also good for books. (and music, games, etc) Their selection is a bit better than Kinokuniya, but they are somewhat more expensive.