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Japanese Auctions

Shopping in Japan… from the comfort of home.

So I thought it might be a good idea to share how a love for fountain pens and calligraphy has turned into a whole new obsession with direct access to the Japanese market – especially the second-hand market.

Purchasing from overseas may seem a bit daunting at first, but I’m here to tell you that with a few tools at your disposal you can buy as easily as if you were shopping on eBay or Amazon – and have it arrive almost as quickly.

There are a few hurdles you may need to overcome when buying:
• Everything is in Japanese (duh!).
• The store may not have a web presence (smaller stationary stores).
• The store may not accept foreign credit cards, even with a domestic address via a middleman service.
• The auction seller may only ship domestically (98% of Yahoo Japan Auctions are restricted like this.
• You want to order a lot of items but don’t want to take a hit shipping each package internationally.

To solve these you really just need two or three tools – Google Translate (either the website or what I prefer – the browser plugin), and a middleman service like Buyee or ZenMarket.

Translating made easy
What’s nice about Google’s translation plugin is you can highlight a word and it will recognize the Japanese and pop an icon to trigger a translation – or you can have it just translate the entire page for you all at once – including navigation menus (if they are not graphics) and find most of the necessary things you need like product categories and filters.

Even armed with this it always helps to know a few general terms while browsing in the rare event that the navigation is a graphic:
Fountain Pen – 万年筆
Sailor – セーラー
Pilot – パイロット
Platinum – プラチナ
Pelikan – ペリカン
Lamy – ラミー
Mont Blanc – モンブラン

And when it comes to the auction itself these terms will help out a bit:
Sorted by remaining time left (low to high): 残り時間の長い順
Sorted by price (low to high): 在価格の安い順
Sorted by number of bids (low to high): 入札件数の少ない順
Bid – 入札する
Buy now – 今すぐ札する
Remaining time – 残り時間
Number of bids – 入札件数
Price (in Yen) – You may see either ¥ or 円 – current exchange rates are about 108¥ to the dollar but you can check today’s rate here.

Armed with this info you should be able to navigate most of Yahoo Auctions and find some great deals (I’ll share some of mine later). The next step is purchasing that sweet deal – enter the middleman service.

How the Middleman/Proxy services work
So you found something to bid on or buy but now what? Some websites ship internationally but in this case lets focus on ones that do not. The middleman offerings I use depend on the purchase – If I want to buy from a smaller store that has a pretty picky checkout process I tend to use ZenMarket – you simply sign up for an account and send them the URL of the product you want and they will purchase it for you. Once it arrives at their warehouse you just select how you want it shipped (EMS and SAL Small Packet are the best options in my opinion). Costs here are minimal – a 3.5% cash transfer fee and a ¥300 service fee per item.

For buying off Yahoo Japan Auctions I love Buyee – their site works right into the Yahoo auction interface and translates everything for you. They also create a Japanese address in Tokyo where you can have items sent domestically – mine for instance is:

スチューアート・リボー
Japan
千住曙町42-4
TS558192
足立区
Tokyo
1200023

This gives me a domestic place to ship items which brings another benefit – package consolidation. Buyee will (for ¥1000) combine multiple small boxes into a larger box to help save on shipping – a good example was my recent pen spending spree – 10 boxes @ about $23/ea were combined and only cost me $70 to ship all in one single box – a $160 savings, all for about $10.

One thing to note is searching through buyee directly does not always bring back every result you may get searching Yahoo Japan Auctions directly – but there is a way around it. Find the item you want on Yahoo and in the URL copy everything after the last “/” – so something like “q294081706”. Take that over to Buyee and paste it into the auction search and your item will magically appear. There are a few things Buyee will not let you bid on due to things like shipping laws, bad seller reviews, certain terms in the product title, but these are few and far between.

The Buyee Auction Interface

With Buyee the payment and fee structure is a bit different – you tie a payment method to Buyee (I prefer Paypal) and when you win they bill you for the auction – this can include the item price itself and both an insurance and/or inspection fee if you want (¥500/¥300) and the per item service fee (5% – though they sometimes have a coupon to waive that fee). When your packages arrive you can consolidate them, and then it’s time for shipping. At this point you will pay for both the domestic shipping of the item and the shipping from Buyee to your house. Typically EMS is about $20-25 for a fountain pen and takes as little as 2-3 days from Tokyo to my place in New Hampshire.

So what kind of deals did I find while shopping? A 21K Sailor Profit/1911L in silver trim for $50, a mint condition vintage Sailor “Master’s Tournament” PGA Golf set with a 14k fountain pen and ballpoint for $35, a brand new ebonite King of Pen for $528 – amazing deals for sure.

The results of my auction spree

Some closing thoughts on this insanity – always check the photos closely as some older pens will show corrosion on the metal trim if they were poorly cared for. Check for obvious signs of damage – there were a few “too low to believe” prices until I noticed the nibs looked like they took a dive off Tokyo tower. Check pricing from other Japanese domestic sellers – some of them sell via Ebay and once you factor in shipping and fees may be cheaper than ordering direct.

Finally a bit of an explanation for the 6 Sailor 1911 models in the picture above – the plan is to work with a few Urushi/Maki-e artists and so I figured even if the barrels were a little scuffed it was all getting covered anyway – plus at under $70/ea who could pass that up? Yea… probably time for that intervention right?

The vintage PGA Masters set

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