topic.

If not, any other alternatives for me?
There's a specific book that I want, and also I want the upcoming super mario collection for wii.

I can do it from Germany, why shouldn't it work from America.

What kind of Book do you want? isbn?

I've done it a fair bit. To order non-electronics stuff, you can have it shipped directly.

To order other things, like video games and keyboards, you need a reshipper like Tenso.com to ship to, and they'll charge you to reship it.

For both, I was able to use my Visa card from a US Bank.

Edit: You'll know what you have to have reshipped because it will warn you about what items it can't ship when you go to check out.

Edit2: And for books, I usually use Kinokuniya (via internet, or they have physical locations in the US) or bk1.jp.

Ah, so I can order books no problem, but they won't ship me the game apparently.
Tenso.com seems like it might work ok. Maybe I can find a different place to import the game a bit cheaper though.

They should ship most books internationally but their international shipping fees are huge (not entirely their fault, though, shipping books overseas from Japan is EXPENSIVE). As wccrawford pointed out, double-check Kinokunia to see if that would be cheaper overall.

Kinokunia seems to have what I was looking for. Maybe I'll pick up a few extra books from them too :p

You can use http://www.play-asia.com/ for games.

Looks like I'm all set then. Thanks everyone.

In case you haven't ordered yet, I've switched from using amazon.co.jp to yesasia.com for buying books/music. Shipping costs from amazon JP are brutal and yesasia has free shipping if you purchase a minimum amount (something like $35-$40). They do tend to jack up the prices a bit, but it still always seems to end up cheaper.

Make a friend in Japan and get them to send stuff to you for cheaper than the amazon shipping?

abarone22 Wrote:In case you haven't ordered yet, I've switched from using amazon.co.jp to yesasia.com for buying books/music. Shipping costs from amazon JP are brutal and yesasia has free shipping if you purchase a minimum amount (something like $35-$40). They do tend to jack up the prices a bit, but it still always seems to end up cheaper.

I thought I'd do a comparison on shipping costs with yesasia and bk1 for the last bk1 order I did, which was 4 manga, one children's book (魔女の宅急便) and the Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar. The first difficulty I encountered was that yesasia only had one out of three of the manga, and didn't have 魔女の宅急便 either. So I adjusted for that a bit by picking an earlier volume of one of the series, which leaves three items and a total yesasia price of
$98.47. BK1's price for those three things is 5352 yen plus shipping. Shipping on the whole lot of six things to the UK cost me 1620 yen, which I'm going to reduce to 2/3 to allow for the fact that six items weigh more than 3, giving a total of 6450 yen or about $77.

So that's about 20% cheaper, plus of course bk1 actually had all the things I wanted :-) There is a catch, however -- that shipping price is for seamail, so some of that 20% is paying for making the order arrive faster.

I wonder why Japanese stores can't ship electronics overseas.
Play-asia can ship you videogames if you want those.