FAQ

We accept credit and debit cards through Shopify Payments, as well as Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal.

Yes. If your orders are going to the same delivery address and none of them has been sent yet, we pack them together and send them as one parcel. You do not need to ask.

Each order is charged its own shipping fee at checkout. If sending them as one parcel costs less than the shipping you paid, we refund the difference after the parcel has been sent.

If you would rather have your orders sent separately, please let us know through the contact form as soon as you can, with your order numbers.

Orders going to different addresses, and orders that have already been sent, are not combined.

Orders of 3 items or more qualify for free shipping with the code FREE3, for delivery to the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia.

Every order is sent from Japan, and we ship worldwide.

If your country is not offered at checkout, please contact us before you order.

Within 2 business days of your order.

We use three services. FedEx takes about 2 to 7 days, and comes with a tracking number and shipment insurance.

EMS, operated by Japan Post, takes about 3 to 12 days, and also comes with a tracking number and shipment insurance.

e-Packet, also operated by Japan Post, takes about 7 to 30 days and comes with a tracking number.

Yes. A tracking number is issued for every parcel, on all three services.

Not necessarily. In some countries the tracking information is simply not updated along the way, and for e-Packet shipments to Australia and Brazil it is not updated at all.

If nothing has changed for more than a week, please contact FedEx or your local post office directly, whichever is carrying your parcel: they can see more than we can from Japan.

The estimates above cover the journey itself, not customs. Clearance can add a considerable delay, and this is most common across Europe.

We send each parcel with its paperwork complete, but once it is in the hands of the destination country's customs, the timing is out of our hands.

No. We are unable to deliver to P.O. Boxes in any country, or to APO and FPO addresses. An order placed to such an address has to be cancelled, so please give us a street address.

By hand. In the short survey we send after an order arrives, packing is the part customers rate most highly.

You might, and we would rather you hear it from us now than from a courier at your door. Our prices and shipping fees do not include import duties or taxes. If your country charges them, the carrier usually collects them around the time of delivery, rather than at our checkout.

We honestly cannot tell you, and we would rather say that than give you a number we cannot stand behind. It depends on your country, the type of item, and its declared value. The amount is set by your country, so the notice from your customs office or carrier decides it — not any estimate of ours. What we can do is tell you exactly what we write on the customs declaration, so you can look up your own country's rate before you buy — see Customs & Import Taxes.

That one surprises people, and it is worth explaining. It is the carrier's own clearance or advancement fee, charged for handling the paperwork, and it is separate from the tax your government charges. It is set by the carrier, not by us, and on lower-value parcels it can be larger than the tax itself. We receive no part of it.

The full price you paid, and a description of the item as it is — an original woodblock print, an antique, or a book — with the customs code that matches it. We are sometimes asked to write a lower value, or to mark an order as a gift, and we cannot do either. Both would be false declarations, and either one would put your parcel at risk rather than save you money.

Sometimes, yes — and we will help. If your customs office classifies the item differently from the way we described it — treating an original woodblock print as a printed poster, for example — you can be charged at a higher rate than the correct one. Write to us with your order number and we will send you the declaration details, including the code we used, so you can ask your customs office to look at it again. Please do that as soon as you can: in some countries the window for a review is short.

Not at the moment. Your country bills you directly rather than through us, so import charges never pass through our checkout. We would rather describe that plainly than fold an estimate into the price and be wrong in either direction.

Please talk to us first. There is often something we can do, and it is almost always better for you than refusing delivery — a refused parcel still has to travel back to Japan, and the return journey costs more than the original one.

All of our books are authentic, with the vast majority of them printed back in the Edo and Meiji eras. We do have books that are reprints of classics, printed later in modern times, with this fact clearly stated in their product descriptions. We do not sell replicas, which in this context means unofficial versions of an antique book which were printed later.

Both. We deal in Japanese woodblock prints — original ukiyo-e, and reproductions printed by hand — as well as antique Japanese books and books about Japanese art.

Yes, with one exception. Each listing is a single item, photographed on its own, so the piece you receive is the piece in those photographs.

That holds for our antique books, for original ukiyo-e, and for the hand-printed reproductions: where the same design appears more than once, each copy has its own listing and its own photographs.

The exception is our Modern Book category, where one set of photographs is used for a title.

Every item is listed with a condition note and a full set of photographs. The photographs are part of the description, so please look at them closely before you decide.

With the antique pieces, rarely: the same item seldom passes through our hands twice. Reproductions are a different matter, and a design can return to the shelves.

Yes. We handle and sell antiques under Japan's Secondhand Goods Business Act, licensed by the Aichi Prefectural Public Safety Commission, licence number 542551604000.

Yes, within 14 days of the day your order reaches you. To be eligible the item must be unused, in the same condition in which it reached you, and in its original packaging, and we will need a receipt or proof of purchase.

You do, and the original shipping fee is not refundable. If a refund is issued, the cost of return shipping is deducted from it.

For an item valued over 75 US dollars we strongly recommend a trackable or insured return service, as we cannot guarantee that an untracked return will reach us.

Once your return has reached us and been inspected, we will email you to say whether the refund has been approved or declined. If it is approved, the credit is applied to your original method of payment.

We cannot process a refund for an item that is still in transit, is on its way back to us, or has not reached us.

Two come up most often. Sale items are not refundable; only regular-priced items are eligible.

And we cannot accept a return, exchange or refund for an order that was refused, sent back, delayed or disposed of because of import duties, taxes or a customs clearance problem.

No. We do not have a storefront, and all of our business is conducted through this online store.

Not at present. We do not currently have a buyback policy.

Use the contact form on this site, and someone here will read and answer your message.