Treasure Hunting

You know those weird, obscure anime/manga that you think are just so cool, but practically nobody's ever heard of? Y'know how you sometimes just want something in your hot little hands, but can't find it anywhere? Forget Ebay. If there's anything there, it'll be painfully overpriced. :P

Yahoo!Japan is your new best friend. >.> First, enable Japanese-language fonts. ^^; Otherwise you can't see a thing. Then, you're going to have to figure out how to write the title/author/etc of what you want. Hmm, tricky.

Not. ^^

Jeffrey's Japanese⇔English Dictionary lets you search in kanji, hiragana, katakana, romanji, and English. :)
Jim Breen's WWWJDIC lets you look up those pesky uber-funky kanji one bloody radical or stroke at a time.

So, then, you toddle off and punch your nifty little search term into Y!Japan, and woah, things come up! >.> In Japanese. So, being the nice little visual people we are, we click on the [ 画像のみ ] linkie that brings up all the thumbnails! Yay! Peruse! ^.^

Ah, and stumbling-block #2 comes up! It looks cool, but what is it actually? >.> Aka, how to tell the difference between a Poster and a Postcard. :)

Nifty Lil' Translation Page! lets you stick in any URL and get it translated into English. >.> Maybe I should qualify that... you get questionable, broken Engrish, but eh, it's good enough for government work. :)

So! Now that you have found your cool treasure, you want to bid on it! Alas, Japanese sellers don't ship outside Japan 99% of the time. Not to mention you'd have to communicate in Japanese. >.> Not exactly an easy feat. ^^; SO! You need a third-party to bid on it, conduct the transaction, then send it to the 'States. >.> For a modest fee... *le sigh*

Celga is the easiest and most affordable one I've found to date. Sometimes I wonder if they're convinced I'm crazy for buying teacups and stickers, but... ^^;

>.> Of course, the downside to this is that it's yet another way to go broke really quickly...