What's in this guide8 sections
Quick answer
Switching proxy services fixes four things: fees, inspection, storage and payment. A ¥500 purchase fee drops to ¥50. Inspection costs ¥300 to add. Those are commercial decisions, and a different company will make them differently.
Five things do not move. Alcohol cannot leave Japan by post at all. Blades cannot reach the US, Australia or Canada. Loose lithium batteries are refused. A Japanese warranty ends at a Japanese address. The $800 duty-free exemption has been suspended since August 2025. None of these belong to your proxy service, which is why no alternative to it solves them.
Open Doorzo’s fee page and the numbers arrive as pictures. You cannot copy them, and you cannot search them. Whether your fee is ¥50 or ¥300 stays unsettled until the order goes through. Wondering whether another company would be easier is a reasonable response to that.
What happens next depends on how you look.
Search for a Japan proxy alternative in English and you get lists of ten companies, each with a table of fees and supported sites. The lists are built on an assumption: that switching solves the problem you started with.
It solves about half of them. Across 22 articles measuring the terms and the fee tables of these companies, the same split kept appearing. Some walls come down when you change supplier. Others stand at exactly the same height on the other side. If you are up against the second kind, more alternatives will not help.
Which problems switching fixes
The left column is the reason people go looking. The right column is what we measured.
| Why you are looking | Fixed by switching? | Where to go, and the evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Fees are too high | Yes | Doorzo ¥50–300 per item, Neokyo ¥350 per item. Buyee raised its fee from ¥300 to ¥500 in April 2026 |
| You want the item inspected | Yes | Buyee sells inspection at ¥300, FromJapan includes it in its ¥500 plan. Neokyo states it does not inspect |
| The damage claim window is too short | Yes | FromJapan: 7 days from arrival. Neokyo: 5 months from dispatch |
| The cheapest route is locked below $800 | Yes | Doorzo restricts Japan Post to US orders over $800. ZenMarket quotes EMS with no order minimum |
| The fees are not published | Yes | Doorzo’s fee page is entirely images. Every other service publishes a table |
| Currency conversion costs about 5% | Partly | Three services convert at their own rate, 4.88% to 5.04%. Japan Rabbit prices everything in USD |
| You want to ship alcohol | No | Japan Post prohibits it to every destination by every method, surface mail included |
| You want to ship a knife to the US, Australia or Canada | No | ECMS refuses all three. Japan Post lists “blades in general” for the US |
| You want to ship a loose lithium battery | No | Batteries not installed in equipment are refused |
| You want the warranty to work at home | No | Manufacturers write the limit as a Japanese address |
| You want the $800 exemption back | No | The US suspended it in 2026 (couriers 24 June, mail 24 July) |
Everything above the break is a commercial decision. Everything below it is a rule. Where that line falls decides whether switching is worth the afternoon it takes.
If it is only about the fee, the answer is short
Doorzo charges ¥50 to ¥300 per item and Neokyo ¥350 per item, against Buyee’s ¥500 per order since April 2026 (Buyee fees, Neokyo fees). Buy often enough and the gap is real money.
Read only the fee column, though, and you will usually pick wrong. Neokyo’s ¥350 arrives with ¥500 of packing charged on every parcel, up to 2kg, then ¥150 for each extra kilo. For a single item Neokyo is not a ¥350 service. It is an ¥850 one, and FromJapan’s flat ¥500 undercuts it.
At three and four items the order reverses. We put both fee tables through the same basket in FromJapan vs Neokyo, and the crossing point sits at the fourth item.
Inspection is something one company will not sell you
If you are buying secondhand, whether anybody looks inside the box before it flies matters. The companies do not agree here, and one of them is unusually direct about it.
Neokyo’s fee page says:
Neokyo does not inspect or authenticate the item as part of the service.
The same page offers a channel to ask the seller questions, then excludes questions about authenticity from it (official). This is a company telling you, in writing, that nobody will look.
Buyee sells an Inspection Plan at ¥300, alongside a Standard Plan at ¥500 (official). FromJapan folds inspection into its ¥500 Product Protection Plan and defines it as confirmation that the correct item arrived without significant damage.
So if inspection is what sent you looking, Neokyo is not the destination. Read it the other way and the same sentence becomes an argument for Neokyo: if you buy new and would rather no one opened the parcel, you are not paying for a service you did not want.
How long you get to say it arrived broken
The widest gap we found sits here.
FromJapan asks you to contact Customer Service within 7 days of the package arriving. Neokyo allows 5 months from dispatch.
That is a window twenty-one times wider. The company selling inspection is the one that closes fastest, and the company that told you it would not look is the one that waits. It runs against the intuition, which is part of why it is worth knowing before you choose.
One qualification: Neokyo’s five months is a claim it forwards to the carrier, not compensation it pays itself. Whether that trade is worth it depends on what is in the box.
The $800 wall belongs to Doorzo
For US-bound parcels, Doorzo opens Japan Post routes (EMS, EPL, air mail, sea mail) only when the order total exceeds $800. Its ¥3,300 sea mail is the cheapest figure we have found from any proxy service, and the orders that need a figure that low are exactly the ones that never reach $800. We priced the whole thing in Doorzo vs ZenMarket.
This one switching does fix. ZenMarket quotes EMS with no order minimum, at ¥7,900 for the 2kg box we measured. The cheapest option changes hands, but nothing is locked.
The five that do not move
These five do not move because the company was never the one holding the rule. Set five services’ prohibited-item lists side by side and the pattern is visible in the numbers themselves: what Japan proxies won’t ship traces the 24% alcohol line and the two-battery limit back to Japan Post, and shows where the companies genuinely do differ.
Alcohol. Japan Post classes alcoholic drinks as flammable liquids, dangerous goods that cannot be sent by any class of mail or any mode of transport, with surface shipping expressly included (Japan Post). Change proxy all you like: if Japan Post carries the parcel, the answer is the same. Your suitcase is the only route.
Blades. A kitchen knife bound for the US, Australia or Canada fails the same way. ECMS, the carrier many proxies default to, refuses all three countries, and Japan Post’s US prohibited list reads “blades in general” with kitchen knives named in the note. Checked baggage is untroubled by any of it. The rules only bite when you post it.
Loose lithium batteries. Installed in or attached to the equipment, they travel. Packed alongside it, or sent alone, they are refused. That condition is what catches power banks (what does and does not survive the trip).
Warranties. Canon, Nikon and Sony write the same limit onto the card: purchase and use at an address in Japan. A proxy service has a Japanese address. You are not the person living at it, and that is where the cover stops.
The $800 exemption. The US suspended de minimis in 2026, for couriers on 24 June and for international mail on 24 July. Anything under $800 used to enter duty-free, so every total you calculated before that date is now wrong by the duty (what changed for high-value orders).
Not one of those five appears anywhere on a fee table. That is precisely why comparing fee tables never turns them up.
Each company is abandoned for a different reason
| Service you are leaving | The usual complaint | Switching |
|---|---|---|
| Buyee | Fee went ¥300 to ¥500, currency markup, Trustpilot 3.6 from 8,005 reviews despite being the biggest | Fixes the fee. For the markup, pick a service that bills in yen |
| Doorzo | Fees readable only as images, the $800 wall, a second charge you cannot see in advance | Fixes all three, though Doorzo’s 4.6 is among the highest scores here |
| ZenMarket | Cancellation fees, repacking delays, ¥800 on Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions | Fixes those, but you give up 60-day storage and EMS with no minimum |
| Neokyo | No inspection, ¥500 packing on every parcel, support in limited languages | Inspection can be bought elsewhere for ¥300 |
| Japan Rabbit | Effective fee of 6–9%, everything priced in USD, fee page last updated over a year ago | Fixes the cost. Its packing reputation, 4.8 from 3,125 reviews, is the best on this list |
The Trustpilot column and the complaint column do not line up. The largest service holds the lowest score, and the two named most often as escape routes both sit at 4.6. People still leave them, because a score cannot tell you whether anyone opens the box.
So where should you go
Decide which wall you are against before you compare another fee table.
If it is fees, inspection, storage or payment, the first table above is the whole answer. ¥500 too steep: Doorzo. Inspection required: Buyee or FromJapan. Long storage: ZenMarket or FromJapan at 60 days. The full seven-service breakdown, with every number we could verify, is in our comparison of the main Japan proxy services.
If it is any of the five, there is no destination. The alcohol goes in your suitcase. So does the knife, in checked baggage. The battery ships inside the device. The warranty gets used while you are still in Japan.
One thing we could not settle: Doorzo publishes no criterion for where inside ¥50 to ¥300 your fee lands. We read the fee page down to the images and found no condition attached to it.