Buying tea ceramics from Japan

First, a few words about the proxy service itself. I used ZenMarket (it’s not the only option, but the terms look reasonable and there are good reviews on Reddit). ZenMarket lets you buy from several major and minor Japanese websites (including Amazon, Rakuten, etc.). After you pay, ZenMarket purchases the item and ships it to their warehouse in Osaka, charging 500 JPY (~3 USD) for this. Later, you can combine several orders into one package and have it shipped. It’s also worth noting that for packages valued under 150 EUR, you can use the IOSS procedure when shipping, which means paying VAT upfront. This has two advantages: first, the shipping cost is not included in the total package value, and second, customs clearance is faster (though Poczta Polska will still charge an additional 8.50 PLN for “filing a customs declaration”). If you want to try ZenMarket, I recommend topping up your account in yen using Revolut/Curve or anything else with a good exchange rate.

Getting back to ceramics, what interests us most here is Yahoo Auctions. As the name suggests, you can find a variety of auctions there, including tea-related ones. The ZenMarket site has a built-in browser, so you can try searching directly for items in categories of interest (e.g., typing “matcha” immediately shows a diverse selection of chawans; with other queries it may be harder). For me, the more convenient option turned out to be searching manually on the Yahoo Auctions site (among other things, the product page shows similar listings, which makes searching easier), and then just pasting the link on the ZenMarket site to add it to your watchlist. If you want to do the same, you’ll need a Japanese VPN (e.g., ProtonVPN even in the free version has Japanese servers), because the Japanese don’t want GDPR there and Japanese Yahoo Auctions is blocked for EU users.

Below are some useful keywords for searching (I’m happy to hear other suggestions):

• Chawan (茶碗) - a really large selection
• Guinomi cups (ぐい呑み) and Ochoko (お猪口)
• Kyusu (急須) - also a large selection. For me, the most interesting thing was that there’s no way to find, say, a houhin or shiboridashi — everyone calls everything kyusu. A helpful approach is to find, say, one houhin, and then look at similar items at the bottom of the page.
• 朱泥 急須 - various clay teapots — Taiwanese, Yixing F1 and others, Chaozhou

Finally, here’s an example of one of the most interesting things I managed to buy — a shrimp houhin.

For some reason, nobody wanted to bid on it, so I bought it for 1000 JPY (it’s also worth remembering that domestic shipping in Japan almost always costs extra — here it was 800 JPY), and with shipping and tax it cost me 30 USD, which I consider a very good price.