In the bigger picture it's due to the many items that were sold in view of the events (not) opening within the year (that have been cancelled) so they have to sell their goods online and that's when I come in to snatch a couple of stuff I like which I will talk more about in other posts, but this one package of finding not the newest stuff is specifically based on two guidelines: (1) No auction betting to pay more than what I can chew. Haha yeah that is actually easy there are physical stores especially in Japan that sell photos of beautiful women (not gravure, haha) and also online btw and I'll just pay for international shipping while aiming to get free local shipping. And to show a large sample for such an operation to cover all the auction trips I've made for a sampling, (2) this package should contain 50 items. Yes, FIFTY. INDIVIDUAL. PHOTOS. Again, stir crazy figures right here. For comparison, the last time I went to the auction house, I only came back with a fifth of this amount.

So, thanks to Suraga-ya through Rakuten, I managed to find myself FIFTY different photos (as we will call them now) of a variety of girls I know of probably with the similar objective of that previous auction post: to find people to pad the list of girls who took too many selfies lol. BUT, here's the big but, things didn't go too well. Turns out, if I were to guess, the store did not really update regularly their stock, so every time I order in batches of 10-12 photos, I always get my order rejected. They did not state their reasons for rejection (I can read Japanese btw), but suspect is as long as they see ONE photo that is not in their store anymore (physically) they reject the whole order. At this point, around a week of doing this to and fro choosing other photos and sacrificing those I saw in first impression *sigh* then did I come to realise that yeah, the store did not have a way to check for stock. So I was bring an idiot doing this back and forth for like a week, reducing whatever I chose of the 50, eliminating as they slowly update the sold-out stock online and then ordering the remainder again (you need to reach about an average of 10 photos to get free local delivery and I was taking advantage of that), and again, and again... I was not being smart haha.

So, I tried other options after getting fed up of literally helping them stock check on their online store for 3 weeks lmao, I went back to my shopping friend from Japan, Buyee. Yeah, same place as the post last time. But again, what is different is that no auction. And surprisingly, I can find products from Suraga-ya from there. Problem is, you have to pay extra service charge because besides knowing that they do charge more since they are buying on the store on your behalf.... they also tell you which ones are out of stock. Well, not exactly which one, so I was basically doing trial and error until I can find enough to ship one pack of them. Yeah, it was somehow more tiring doing that for a week than what I've done above, by the way. So, by now you should have seen that it's already not worth it. Then, as I was looking around in Buyee, I got myself a coupon.

"Free international shipping for first time buyers", huh. I could save a lot for shipping anything home and even though I have to pay for service fees, I still think this was a huge discount over the whatever other two methods I've done to burn all my energy (not money) (yet) into just trying to buy stuff off the Internet. And so, still not auction by the way, I went shopping on Buyee's new partnership and probably co-owned online store, Mercari. Yes, there's a Western region version but if you go there you won't see photos of female voice actresses in Japan, I promise you. *laughs* So yeah, on Mercari Japan, since this is relatively a new store, there aren't many things on sale, but this works similarly to many stores out there today that are online which I soon realise work under the same framework: No auction, seller's list their prices, and there are options for selection. Yes, you cannot negotiate for prices, but you can choose what to get. One may wonder why you can do that, but suffice it to say if you have a dozen photos not all will want to get the whole set, so they can just write in the comments what they want specifically, and prices can be negotiated then. Yeah, that's the future. Go to Otamart which forwards to FromJapan for more examples. But since I'm at my trusty friend here who still provides the most reasonable service fees till date, I still went with here, and remember, there's the coupon.

So I'm finally at the point where ordering integrity wouldn't be an issue, but surprisingly, getting my package stuffed took a lot of time and to and fro too. Mainly due to seller rejections, but also ordering this much will take time, compared to buying it from a standard store like Suraga-ya, so time wise it's similar to auction. Not going to bore you with details, but there are some that you will notice later in the unboxing list of items are lacking of like my dear imouto Natsukawa Shiina because those sellers rejected most of the items I wanted which is a pity. But yeah, bearing the sadness from Suraga-ya saying farewell to many photos that I couldn't get are already out of stock before I even clicked the button, I continued on to reach the number I was aiming for. And finally, after a month and a half since where I started, I got all the stuff I... may have wanted since the others I couldn't even get anyways haha. Problem is, also I would blame Taketatsu Ayana (Ayachi) for this, but because I saw two sets of her photos which are relatively new (like her marriage lol) I ended up with something larger than 50.

It was 60. *laughs* And yeah, at this point it's a sixth of that other box. *laughs*

And finally after all this work it's ready to ship off (with the protective packaging as you'll see in a while) but MAN has it been stuck for a while. I received this today (at home, because you know, work from home) along with another package (which you don't have to know it's just cup noodles from Japan, search for ZenPop) because somehow both were stuck in Japan's post office for... about 2 weeks? (The two weeks which I got a break off my weekends which will probably NOT happen this weekend lol sob) Yeah, both of them, as both also shipped out of the warehouses around the same date period. Really was about to go complain but as I wanted to, it got updated so I calmed down haha. All in all, quite a journey to get what I want, so let's see what I got for myself! It's show-off time!! *laughs*

Wait, you asking for real intentions? I've not been spending much money since the quarantine and my savings is increasing, so... haha