So after getting frustrated with the lack of weeaboo items that Kinokuniya, Uniqlo and Mitsuwa were providing me I decided to seek out greener pastures. One day in Gmail I saw an ad for Rakuten: Japan’s Biggest Online Shopping mall. I decided to check it out and then I discovered an English page.

The English page is just a front page where you can get information on Rakuten account signups and shipping policies. After 2 successful purchases from here, I wanted to recommend it to my readers. Creating an account is fairly simple and you can use any online translator (I like Jim Breen’s) to help you out. The way Rakuten works is you’re buying from a “merchant” rather than from “Rakuten” so you can’t really compare it to Amazon 100%.

The problem is – all merchants are different. Not all will ship outside Japan and most will not combine shipping if you order from 2 different merchants. If you plan to “save money on shipping by combining items” you should buy them all from the same merchant to avoid problems later on.

How can you tell that a shop ships to foreign countries? When you go to a shop’s front page (for example this one). You will find a link on there to shop information. When you scroll all the way to the bottom you will see “Rakuten International Shipping Services. Shipping fee will be advised from stores for your order confirmation.” If you see this paragraph there, that means they ship outside Japan. Sometimes though “foreign countries” means United States only so if you are from a different country you may want to email the shop owner (probably in Japanese) and ask if they ship to your country.

The geta I purchased.

The down side is, shipping is usually really expensive. For a pair of 1000yen geta I had to pay about 1600 yen in shipping making my order now $28 or so instead of $12. Of course if the currency exchange rate wasn’t so god damn shitty, it wouldn’t be an issue in the first place. The upside is, because you are paying crazy shipping, they mail everything global express mail so I’ve gotten my orders literally within a 7 day period.

The other important thing to note is Japan size is very different from US size. I’m gonna be honest here, if you are overweight, don’t bother buying clothes from Japan. They are very tiny and their largest size may accommodate maybe as much as a size 12 (for women anyway, don’t know about the men.) There are various sites online you can find to convert your size to Japan size to help you pick the right one when you order.

Anyway Rakuten has a TON of cute stuff but beware a lot of the cute dresses I’ve found (particularly the sweater kind) are made from Acrylic or Polyester. I don’t know about anyone else but I hate buying clothes that are so crappy they turn into shit after 2 washes. With this in mind there are some “Japanese” goodies you can get for a nice price, particularly off season such as geta, and yukata items. Good luck!