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Buying from Japan

6K views 52 replies 10 participants last post by  violetevergarden 
#1 ·
I've never bought a guitar from overseas before... I know there are certain CITES implications currently. Something else strange caught my eye today and I've seen it before with guitars from Japan. I've been checking out Ibanez guitars with H-S or H-S-S pickup configuration and noticed two particular auctions, #183352293048 and #263601675918 on the most popular auction site. A quick look at the photos up close show the serial number to be the same on both... so two separate auctions with two separate "buy it now" prices for the same guitar. What gives?
 
#2 ·
Ignore anything listed on ebay from Japan. You'll see the same guitar listed 20 times by 20 different sellers.

One of your sellers has 9700 listings and the other 6500. There is no guitar dealer in the world with 6500 guitars in stock.

They take any guitar listed on any of the japanese dealers websites and they relist them on ebay with a healthy upcharge. Some of those could be years old, it's not like anybody is keeping track if any of their 9700 listings have been sold, until somebody buys it and they have to.

I've seen some listing flat out say the guitar shown may not be the one you receive.
 
#4 ·
I don't think that it's quite this simple. IF you can figure out who really has the guitar and IF it's a place that is willing and experienced with international buyers, by all means go that route. Like if you can tell that the guitar is at Ikebe or Ishibashi, definitely deal with them directly.

But I've done the math on a few of these and the deals aren't always awful. I've found a couple where you're basically paying a $150 brokerage fee. If you're buying through eBay, all the protection is on your side. And if they're sourcing from somewhere that would be tough for you to work with, that fee is relatively nominal.
 
#5 ·
You may have found a couple with a small fee, but that means you had to do all the work to track where the original dealer was and what the actual price is. Usually everything I see listed from japan is way overpriced.

I've bought 2, long ago, but within 3 days the payments were refunded, the guitars were no longer available.

Save the hassle, just buy from Itchy or Ikebe or yahoo and just ignore anything listed on ebay.
 
#13 ·
Yeah i severely dislike USPS. When our first daughter was born the complex we were living at was redoing the parking lot around the mailboxes. So, our postman up and decided to not deliver mail even weeks after the work was completed apparently. Mind you we still had bills coming in from the first born!
Then more recently there was a nice big heavy package from Amazon Prime that showed up on our door. Probably a gaming console. The only thing our address had in common with the one on the box was the street name. Different street number. Different apartment number. I googled it and it was for an apartment up the street. I dropped it off at their complex office.
Talk about DGAF Mode!
 
#15 ·
...more recently there was a nice big heavy package from Amazon Prime that showed up on our door. Probably a gaming console. The only thing our address had in common with the one on the box was the street name. Different street number. Different apartment number. I googled it and it was for an apartment up the street. I dropped it off at their complex office.
Talk about DGAF Mode!
I was working on a friend's house around Christmas and found a package on their porch (which had the address clearly visible on the porch post) that was addressed for a block away. Came back the week after Christmas and there were five more packages for the same address and the people were in panic mode reporting their Christmas gifts as missing.

The only good news is that I think that driver got fired.
 
#14 ·
Our mail carriers are super nice, but the whole system just doesn't work well. Lots of Amazon packages end up coming through USPS and the "tracking" is a joke. Things are marked delivered hours or even the day before they're delivered to my house. I asked the carrier once when I was freaked out about something that had been marked delivered and he explained that they mark them all as delivered at the post office before doing their route, because they have no way to do realtime tracking like UPS or FedEx. So basically, if the package doesn't end up getting delivered you're screwed because the tracking claims that it was.
 
#19 ·
Still swimming in awesome guitars, I see! I literally had to google 3 guitars you mentioned... lol. Cobrans look like nice guitars, although probably pretty hard to find outside of Japan. It sure is nice to have multiple guitars for different tunings, especially if you are into locking tremolos (but who isn't?). I usually keep most in std E, one in drop D, one in D std lately for some old Floyd I was messing with, and one in Eb, but the solid bridge guitars are easy to change tunings. I just need to thin them out and not buy more... lol. I know how it goes though, if I sell a few I'll roll that extra $$ into a https://www.prsguitars.com/index.php/electrics/s2/s2_custom_24_2018 I got to play a new S2 Custom 22 a few weeks ago and fell in love with the feel. I don't really need a '76 LP, an SZ320, and a PRS though. My go to guitar is still the old '89 540S... stock pickups and all!
 
#29 ·
I agree, you can't just lump all "Asian" guitars into one category. Japanese made guitars have always been good quality, with Korean not far behind (from my experiences with a few guitars). The rest are hit and miss, best to put your hands on the instrument before buying if possible.
 
#31 ·
This is true, however each different manufacturer does produce high-end guitars that are uniformly excellent, you do get what you pay for up to a certain point.

I had a Korean BC Rich Assassin which played superbly and sounded terrific but the neck simply WOULD NOT stay put, constant truss rod tweaks drove me mad, none of my Japanese guitars (I have 20+) need touching once set up. I live in the southern UK so the climate is mild and a quality guitar should not need ongoing setup work once it's dialled-in.
I think it's down to timber selection rather than manufacturing quality, most of my early Japanese guitars have quartersawn maple necks which are generally extremely stable once set.
 
#39 ·
Speaking of “Buying From Japan,” I found a bag of money (old currency from around the world) and inside were some yen coins of various denominations. The yen look quite nice.It does not amount to much but it is interesting to see old (and new) currency from other countries that I’ve never been to, and some that I have. The bag belonged to my grandfather who was a pilot and travelled quite a bit in case you were wondering where one finds a bag of money.
 
#40 ·
Speaking of "Buying From Japan," I found a bag of money (old currency from around the world) and inside were some yen coins of various denominations. The yen look quite nice.It does not amount to much but it is interesting to see old (and new) currency from other countries that I've never been to, and some that I have. The bag belonged to my grandfather who was a pilot and travelled quite a bit in case you were wondering where one finds a bag of money.
Sadly, there isnt a big coin collecting community over here or those coins might be worth something. Might be worth more outside Japan tbh, not sure though.
 
#41 ·
Of course I used to buy alot of guitars from Japan before their pricing went crazy, and with buying anything used you never know what you'll end up cleaning out of the case, but this pack was in a gig bag, no recollection of what model it was, but I've been using the "nickels" as ball markers for years [I've lost a couple along the way, but I have more LOL]

The 4567 was the total count in Yen, which at the time was about $50.

 
#50 ·
On the topic of “buying from Japan,” Universal Music is using Japan as a test market for something called the MQA-CD. MQA is a high resolution audio format that adapts to the users playback system. If you have a CD player, you get CD quality audio. If you have a universal disc player that can playback anything, you will hear a recording at 32bit/384kHz assuming the master recording was made at that bit depth and sample rate. Anyways, Japan is the only country where these MQA-CD’s are available at the moment and I was curious if anyone living in Japan has heard of these or bought one? The MQA-CD is a niche product that is being tested in one market. I found out about it today by chance. MQA audio has been around for a few years, but never in a physical format.
 
#51 ·
On the topic of "buying from Japan," Universal Music is using Japan as a test market for something called the MQA-CD. MQA is a high resolution audio format that adapts to the users playback system. If you have a CD player, you get CD quality audio. If you have a universal disc player that can playback anything, you will hear a recording at 32bit/384kHz assuming the master recording was made at that bit depth and sample rate. Anyways, Japan is the only country where these MQA-CD's are available at the moment and I was curious if anyone living in Japan has heard of these or bought one? The MQA-CD is a niche product that is being tested in one market. I found out about it today by chance. MQA audio has been around for a few years, but never in a physical format.
never heard of it, but I'll stop by yodobashi camera over the weekend and check it out.
 
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