Have anybody tried it before? So far there are 3 tsumego books in my cart, 2 from Cho U, and 1 from Go Seigen and the total is about 53 dollars. The shipping cost+handling charge is 42 dollars...to U.S. This seems discouraging.

I look at Tchan001 list of books and found 3 of them to be interesting so I decided to buy it but unfortunately shipping too expensive. There are other books too but Jp.Amazon doesn't have them, but the other sellers have them, but they don't send outside of Japan.

I order books from Japan all the time. Usually I wait until a friend and I have about 10+ books so the shipping is cheaper. Generally 30% of my payment is shipping. However, if I go to Kinokuniya, they have a markup of 25% and 9% state tax, so it works out ok.

My advice is try to find others locally who might be interested in putting an order together.

I've also ordered from Kinokuniya. Theyre short on words but very good if you provide ISBN numbers for books. I did everything by email and it seemed like the shipping was cheaper since it went from their store to you for shipping.

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I found fujisan.com bookstore, and I have 6 books on my cart, with the total of 180$ included the shipping to U.S, which is about 25 dollars per book +5 dollars shipping for each. Do you guys think that is a good deal? The price in Yen and Dollar is off, I guess they already considered profit. All 6 books are tsumegos book from tchan001 list recently, the title sound attractive so...lol

Sometime this past fall there was a thread here on shipping from Japan. It was posted that due to US Transportation Security Administration rules packages weighing more than one pound can't be shipped into the USA by air. Books add up to more than one pound in weight fairly fast. I don't know whether shipping by seamail is still an option. That's a lot cheaper and maybe larger packages would be allowed.

Amazon has always done this, I've ordered from Japan a few times. If you read the fine print on shipping, there is a handling fee PER book, and a total shipping cost. Buying a lot of books can rack up with the 500 yen per book(?) handling cost. Lately I wanted to pick back up an old comic I haven't bought in awhile, 8 books was around 50 bucks, shipping was around 60 or so, yikes.

The regulations ended a little while ago.