Where to Buy Physical Japanese Manga

While reading manga online can be a lot more convenient, nothing beats the feeling of physically holding a book you’ve been dying to read. If you have been wanting to start collecting manga in Japanese—maybe you’re interested in studying Japanese, or maybe you just want to support your favourite author—I’ve got you covered!

JP Fans

This is a new-to-me website, and now that I’ve finished testing it out, I can finally recommend it. JP Fans works as a proxy shipper—they basically help you obtain things from companies that wouldn’t ship to your country. Personally, I think JP Fans works best for those who have been wanting to try out Mercari. (we don’t have this in Canada!)

Here are my tips for those interested in trying out JP Fans:

Prioritize Mercari—I feel like they have the best options out of everything on the website.
Use “direct search” instead of “auto-translate and search”. You’ll have to figure out the title of the manga you want to read in Japanese and then copy paste it into the search bar, but you’ll find far more listings this way.
Look at each posts original listing on Mercari prior to purchasing—you may miss something if you’re not careful. I accidently only bought the extras that come with a manga, instead of the manga AND the extras. I would have caught the error had I read the description more carefully.

How much is shipping?

That depends completely on what you buy. You may be a little nervous at first, as the first step of the purchasing process with JP Fans is just “buying the manga”. It doesn’t give you a shipping estimate, and it doesn’t ask for your address anywhere.

Once everything you buy makes it to the JP Fans warehouse, they then measure everything and give you the shipping options.

My order consisted of 9 volumes of manga, a few photo cards, and 4 acrylic stands. The total weight was just under 2000 grams, and that made my shipping cost $59.65.

Interested in trying out JP Fans for yourself? Here’s a link that includes a few coupons.

Try it out!

Surugaya

Surugaya is the company I have used the most when it comes to buying manga. It’s a used book store, but a lot of the books I’ve bought from them have been in better condition than brand new Canadian books. They do have a cheaper Japanese version of the site, but if you’re international, you’re stuck using the slightly more expensive English version.

Here are my tips for those interested in trying Surugaya:

Find out the name of the author—in Japanese, usually with Kanji characters—and search that. This is the best way to search for manga, as Surugaya unfortunately likes to use machine translations. A lot of the time it literally translates the Japanese titles literally into English, making some series impossible to find. For some reason searching for series in Japanese doesn’t work a majority of the time, so searching using the author’s name is the best choice.
Even if something says it’s sold out, click on the listing to double check. More than a few times, a “sold out” series has had a brand new copy in stock! It’s work the few seconds it takes to double check.

How much is shipping?

Surugaya does free shipping sales so often that I don’t recommend paying for shipping at all. If you’re Canadian like me, the only extra fees you’ll see come in the form of tariffs. I’ve never paid more than $25 in tarifs, and around $20 ~ $23 will be “processing fees” from DHL.

My most recent shipment consisted of 18 books. Though I don’t know how much it weighed, I was charged $24 in tarif fees.

If you want to check out Surugaya, you can click the link below! Sadly I don’t have any coupons to share for this site, but they do sales often enough that there you’ll find a good deal.

Try it out!

Amazon Japan

I feel like everyone knows about Amazon, but I still wanted to include it in my list. If there is a brand new series that I really need to read right away, I will buy it from Amazon Japan. Please not that every country’s Amazon is different, so you’ll have to make an Amazon Japan account if you want to shop with them.

Amazon Japan is the best option when you want a new book and you want it fast. You pay for this quickness unfortunately, as the shipping costs tend to be more expensive than whatever you end up buying.

Here are my tips for those who want to try out Amazon Japan:

Change the language to English—it makes browsing a lot easier.
Change the category in the search bar (at the leftmost) to “Japanese Books”. This will help filter out things if you’re searching for a more niche series. Your search will still include both physical and digital books, so take care to check which is which before you buy anything.
Find out the Japanese title of whatever you want to read. This can be done easily with a quick google search—”What is the Japanese title for *ENGLISH TITLE*?” You then just copy paste the answer into the search bar.
If you’re making a digital manga purchase, triple check you know what you’re buying. Amazon Japan sells digital manga by both the volume, and chapter. This is only applicable for digitals—Physical manga is only sold by the volume.

How much is shipping?

My most recent order consisted of 10 manga, and the total for just the books was $61. Just the shipping was $75. Again, I cannot stress enough that Amazon Japan shipping is expensive. That being said, you don’t have to worry about any tarif or handling fees, at least if you’re Canadian. You’re also paying for speed—my books got to me in just a few days.

If you want to check out Amazon Japan, you can click the link below. Sadly, Amazon Japan really doesn’t offer many deals on their physical manga that make an international purchase worth it, but sometimes their digitals are given limited time “read for free” status.

Check it out!

Maddies Manga