About Torii Post

Most English-language guides about buying from Japan are written by the companies selling you the service. Search "how to buy from Surugaya" or "best proxy service" and nearly every result is a proxy company's own blog, politely concluding that — surprise — you should use them.

Torii Post exists to be the other thing: an independent guide, written from inside Japan, by people who actually use these shops, marketplaces, and services with their own money.

What we cover

• Buying from Japan — proxy services, marketplaces like Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions, specialty shops for figures, music, fashion, and parts, and the real costs of getting a box across the ocean.
• Traveling in Japan — the practical, unglamorous questions that official tourism sites skip, answered with local knowledge.

How we work

We never accepted payment for coverage or rankings. This site did carry affiliate links until 23 August 2026; they have all been removed, and the record of how they worked is in our affiliate disclosure. Recommendations are built from operators' own published terms, our own arithmetic, and the documented experience of the communities we're part of — each named as what it is. When something has a real downside, we say so in plain language.

This site is archived

Torii Post stopped publishing on 23 August 2026. The guides are left online because the reasoning in them is still worth reading, but nothing here is being updated: fees change, shops change their policies, and no one is checking any more. Treat every number as accurate as of the date on the guide and verify it at the source before you act on it.

If we got something wrong, we still want to know — email us. Corrections are read, even though the guides are no longer revised.