copy/pasted from my tumblr:

Tenso.com is a shipping service in Japan. Basically, a lot of great Japanese online stores do not ship internationally. Even Amazon.co.jp does not ship internationally. This sucks. So along comes Tenso and for a small handling fee plus shipping costs you can have your items delivered to their address and they forward it on to you. Neat.

I tried this out for my Ciel Nendoroid. Amazon.co.jp were selling him for around £20 so I figured it wouldn’t be a huge loss if it didn’t go to plan. Well, it did go to plan. Tenso received the item from amazon and within 4 days it was here with me in the UK. AWESOME.

Now on the negative side Tenso only use EMS which is kind of pricey. £20 for a small Nendoroid. But this actually still worked out cheaper than buying it from a UK stockist who were selling him for £55. They do have a calculator on site so you can work out how much it’s likely to cost you. It’ll never be cheap but it is a speedy service that can be tracked which is well worth it in my mind. They also take paypal which is great and straightforward.

They don’t repackage it at all. They open it to check what it is and the value etc that they’ll need to put on the customs declaration but asides from that they just reseal it. Amazon usually package things well so having their box fly internationally isn’t a big deal but I’d be worried about using other sites who might use slightly less robust boxes.

I definitely recommend them. It’s a great service and I’d say it’s well worth the money

Amazon.co.jp ships books internationally, but not music, videos, or electronics.

Oh, well that's news to me. I stand corrected.

I've used it once and everything worked out pretty well. I ordered some dictionaries and manga from amazon.co.jp to my Tenso address. After I had received a notification from the Tenso guys that my stuff had arrived I paid them and then they shipped my order to Europe.

Amazon.co.jp calculates its rates like this: It's a base 2,700 yen shipping charge, then they charge you 300 yen per item. (At least that's to NA.) The upside of Amazon is that it's really fast, and weight doesn't play a role in shipping. So if you have a lot of heavy books you want to order, it might be cheaper to just use Amazon... but if you're just ordering paperbacks/manga/etc. it's probably cheaper to order direct from BK1 and select SAL (and not even mess with Tenso.)

If BK1 doesn't have it, you can check Rakuten's Global Marketplace. There are a lot of little stores there, and someone there may have whatever it is you want. I find that it's easier to search in Japanese than in English there, because some of the translations they use are just plain weird.

Also, if you order from just one store, the store can handle shipping, but if you order form a bunch of different stores, it may be cheaper to use the Rakuten/Tenso "bundle your stuff and let us ship it" service. Depends. (Rakuten is going to start using JPost to send stuff at a cheaper rate, it seems. Dunno when, it was just in the news a few weeks ago.)