"Anonymous said... Why the high price in some mangas?"

Again, let's look at the way it works in Japan. Right now, I'm watching two items that are up for bid, one asking 5,500 yen

the other, 7,500.

Both are chapters of a story published back in 1978 via the Weekly Magazine format. To my knowledge, like many of the works back then, it was never re-published in book form. I have already purchased 4 of the issues from various auctions earlier. These are more expensive than the others had been ... more action in these? The others had very little as per in ring art. Only way to know is to buy them ...

If I go through a proxy firm, like Rinkya, I would pay the winning bid plus service fees and postage within Japan; around $175 if the bids were to stay where they are. At that point, there's the extra money to get it from Japan to me. Since these each are only about 20 pages of a 300 page magazine, I have to ship the entire weight of 600 pages, not just the 40 I want ... let's call that another $25 for both magazines. Final price to me to add 40 pages of an unknown amount of wrestling artwork, around $200.

Still, that's cheaper than going through my contact for this one though. When I had originally asked him if he would take me on as a special customer, bidding on my behalf, I was buying manga readily available in shops still, so the prices were $7 - 10. I told him, to make it worth his while since he's a guy who buys and sells in the Yahoo.jp world, that I'd just double his money for him if he would buy my items exclusively for me. Good deal for him, putting up his cash for two weeks and dealing with the shipping and receiving in Japan, and a good deal for me, as it was less than the proxy companies fees, when all was said and done. But now, since I'm looking at these high priced items when I can find them, well ... I suppose I could try to renegotiate our deal, but when you make a Japanese contact, you really don't want to lose them, ya know?

Anyway, as you can see, it just gets friggin' expensive to get and scan these rarer items .. trust me, it's not me!