John’s December Suruga-ya Unboxing

I decided to try out buying merchandise from a different Japanese company, Suruga-ya. Like buying from Mandarake, the experience wasn’t quite as effortless as I would have preferred, and the delivery arrived in far less sturdy condition than I expected.

Surugaya’s prices are competitive with Mandarake’s, although Surugaya’s selection isn’t nearly as expansive. However, Surugaya does sometimes have obscure and rare items still available that Mandarake quickly sells out of. And Surugaya will sell adult oriented items to foreign customers without making buyers jump through the hoops that Mandarake requires. And yet, the Surugaya website is not nearly as robust as Mandarake’s. In fact, the English language Surugaya website is a bit broken, so extensive searching requires exhaustive effort and manually fiddling with search URLs to force the site to display all of its goods.

If you have a bit of time to spare, I invite you to share my experience of unboxing my first mail order purchase from the Surugaya second-hand anime goods shop.