This is my experience, if people have a better way please let me know.
This is a bit long, sorry...
From what I see the Japanese only use Yahoo for almost everything online (
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/). Which is why in Japan Google actually has ads on TV, but from what I see, they're not working.
Nobody seems to be using eBay either, Yahoo totally locked up the online portal and auctions market -- and I notice Geocities is still running over there, amazingly; it's owned by Yahoo:
http://geocities.yahoo.co.jp/) They also don't use Facebook much, if at all (ref.
http://www.techinasia.com/problem-with- ... -in-japan/ ).
I tried and I don't believe you can get a yahoo.co.jp account if you don't live in Japan. You may even need that stamp they use for official transactions as well, not sure though. Obviously I don't have one of those.
Some enterprising Japanese set themselves up as an intermediary between Yahoo.co.jp and the rest of the planet.
One place called White Rabbit (ref.
http://whiterabbitexpress.com/ ) offers to buy anything you like from stores in Japan and ship it out for a fee (about 10% plus $13 per transaction). Most of the popular stuff they ship out seems to be gadgets, junk food, manga, anime, model kits, things like that which you can only buy in Japan, but they were willing to go talk to Mitsubishi parts resellers for me (I was told no parts prior to 2001). They don't do online auction bids but they are willing to buy stuff for you on Yahoo Japan if there is a Buy Now option. If however you know of something available now in stores in Japan for a Delica, including auto parts stores, they probably will be willing to go over there and buy it for you, then ship it back.
I used
http://jauce.com/ because I noticed that some interesting items were turning up in Yahoo's auctions but with no Buy Now buttons.
Using Chrome combined with Google Translate at first I searched the Yahoo.co.jp site, then when I saw an auction I was interested in or would like to watch, I plugged in the auction number in the Jauce search field.
Now though to find the auctions I like I mostly use another site than Yahoo:
http://aucview.aucfan.com/
Once you found the auction you like in Jauce, if you want to bid you upload funds up front via PayPal to Jauce by clicking that lime-coloured
Deposit button, then you bid, and hope for the best. Your transactions page shows you the status of the auctions you bid on.
If the seller was a store, in Japan they tax store transactions so you may have to upload more funds to Jauce, who will pay that tax and pretend they were the successful bidders on the seller's auction.
If you win, the auction is moved to the Won Auctions section and the item is marked "processing" which means they paid and are waiting for the item to arrive in the mail. In the left pane there is also a link called
WON -- Processing which just lists those.
Once they receive the package in Japan, they update the status and you can see it in
WON - Arrived To Us.
They collect the items and store them in their warehouse. (I can't imagine what's in there, must be interesting
) If you bid on multiple auctions you can wait until they all arrive at their warehouse and tell them to package all the items together to save on shipping costs. When you're ready in the left pane you click Order a Shipment and it will let you select what you want in the package.
They have weight restrictions and their interface seems to be pretty smart, when items weigh a lot or are very bulky you may get a warning. Some things they can't ship because they are just too large or heavy.
in some cases if there needs to be messages between the seller and the buyer they did that for me no problem. Though that was for items I had already won, I doubt they would want to start haggling back and forth during auctions.
Of course once all the items are in their warehouse you have to pay for shipping to your location.
Once they ship the package it will show it and you can track its progress. In my case it was a link that pointed to the Japan Post web site; I was a little alarmed when I saw that my package was headed for the second-least populate prefecture in Japan on their West coast instead of going east, but there must be a cargo airport there just for packages because my package arrived at the Canada Post station in Dartmouth NS just a few days later.
When I picked it up I had to pay the Canada Customs fee (tax). Maybe because of that the mail delivery guy dropped off the package slip in our mailbox and ran away, he didn't ring the doorbell or anything. i had to wait an extra day because of that.
All in all they make it relatively easy, provided you have the funds for what you bid on.
There are interesting auctions out there... could become addictive...
Here's a fun one for example a roll-up tarp which seems to have been a Mitsubishi option at some point:
https://www.jauce.com/auction/q25650103
i saw a Chamonix shovel and a foldable ladder in a vinyl travelling case, memorabilia pins from some Mitsubishi events, weird looking 4x4 event stickers, different parts, some of it probably the Japanese sellers think is just junk at this point, but to us it can be useful.
(ref. Chamonix ladder:
http://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/n130509321/ )
Here is a Terzo ladder which sold for 46 dollars:
http://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/t382701187/
I don't know if you could get something like that shipped in the mail though, that would be a very large package.
I noticed that the things I want the most don't appear much, though the auction are flooded with shocks, LED lights, pages and pages. It can be very time consuming to sift through all the auctions.
There are other auction sites but so far I've only bought from yahoo auctions. The other ones are a bit esoteric.
aucfan though seems to search the more popular ones. Rakuten is a huge retail store chain in Japan and they seem keen on shipping things internationally, they set up a global oniine store. They also have auctions like eBay or Yahoo. But I noticed their English site doesn't have as many items as their Japanese site...
For example if you search their site for Delica Space Gear you mostly get HID light kits which ship easily:
http://global.rakuten.com/en/search/?k= ... ch_regular
On the Japanese site:
http://search.rakuten.co.jp/search/mall ... rp=product
I am guessing that parts resellers have their own contacts inside Japan and they know what parts work with which frame types, so for some things it's probably easier and safer to go with parts reselers we already have here in Canada. I searched online because I'm on the east coast... the only "popular" JDM shop here is on Kijiji and they seem to specialize on Kei trucks though I am told they have sold other things.
On Youtube I saw some videos showing auto recyclers in Japan who buy old vehicles and have parts for sale. They don't post on online auction sites though. I would be happier if I could speak Japanese and had contacts over there. I guess many places can interact in English but you would have to know which places actually have old Delica L300 or Space Gear parts in their warehouses.
If you're in a hurry or desperate enough you can use use Google Chrome as your browser, use
translate.google.com to translate an item name from English to Japanese, the plug it into
https://www.google.co.jp/?gws_rd=ssl, see if you find anything. You may want to switch to Images, sometimes it's faster. But once you find the item, you can go to the site and hope they have an e-mail address and you can try to send them an e-mail... most won't respond but a few might.
I hope this helps somewhat.
Searching for stuff can take hours and hours, if you're waiting for something specific that was available 15-20 years ago.
And I really wanted to find parts, somehow. Since there aren't any parts resellers near where I live, and the diesel mechanics I went to had never seen a Delica before, I started looking online. Probably if there were parts resellers near where I live I might not have spent so much effort trying to understand how to do this. Plus there may be a better way, I just don't know how.