Every guide on this site ends at the same wall. The book exists, it is in stock in Japan, the price is printed — and then you find that the shop will not take your order, or will not take your card, or will not ship to your country. This page is that part of the answer, written once, so the guides can point here instead of repeating it.
It is about one route in particular: buying from Rakuten and having Rakuten's own forwarding service carry the parcel. That is the route the prices on our guides assume. It is not the only route, and we do not claim it is the cheapest — we have not measured the others, and we say so at the bottom rather than guessing.
Rakuten Ichiba — the marketplace, not the whole company — has temporarily suspended orders placed from seven countries. Rakuten's stated reason is not tariffs and not sanctions; it is tax. Its help page says that changes to value-added tax and goods-and-services tax regimes in various countries risk making local delivery and customs clearance difficult, and that orders from the listed countries are suspended as a result.
The list is exactly seven names long. It is not “including” seven, and Rakuten publishes it in full, so we can print it in full: アメリカ・イギリス・オーストラリア・シンガポール・ニュージーランド・ノルウェー・フランス — the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Norway and France.
Two things this does not mean. It does not mean a parcel cannot reach those countries; what Rakuten suspended is accepting an order placed from them, which is a different thing, and its own heading says so. And it does not mean the books are out of reach. On the same page Rakuten points at its own way around the block, and words it with some care:
Delivery to a suspended country may be possible using Rakuten Global Express, the official overseas forwarding service.
“May be.” That hedge is doing real work, and the rest of this page is mostly about finding out where it holds and where it does not.
Rakuten Ichiba is a marketplace of independent shops. Rakuten Books (楽天ブックス) is Rakuten's own shop, a separate operation with separate rules. It is not covered by the seven-country suspension, and that is less good news than it sounds, because it has two limits of its own that apply to everybody, everywhere.
The first is delivery. Rakuten Books' help centre is blunt about it: you can place an order from overseas, but the shop delivers within Japan only. There is no international option to find, no country selector, nothing to negotiate. The page then sends you to Rakuten Global Express, which is the same answer the Ichiba page gives.
The second is payment, and it is the one that catches people out. Rakuten Books does not say that foreign cards are refused — it says there are restrictions on cards issued outside Japan, and that on some items and some orders they cannot be used. Which items, and which orders, it does not say. So the honest version is: your card may work, and you will find out at checkout.
A forwarder gives you an address in Japan. You shop as a domestic customer, the parcels arrive at a warehouse, and the warehouse sends them on to you — several orders consolidated into one box, which is where the saving is. Rakuten Global Express is Rakuten's own, so it works with a Rakuten account you may already have, and it covers both Ichiba and Rakuten Books.
There is one piece of friction worth knowing before you start, because it is legal rather than commercial and there is no way around it. Japan's Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds was amended in 2013 to require identity verification for users of overseas forwarding services — including users who live overseas. Rakuten asks for your name, date of birth and current address, each backed by an official document, before your first shipment. Its own estimate for the face-recognition route is about ten minutes.
Two different payments happen on this route, and they work differently. Rakuten Global Express's own charges — postage, packing options, tax — you pay to Rakuten with a card registered to your Rakuten ID, or with PayPal, or with Rakuten points. That part is straightforward.
The books themselves you pay for at the shop, and that is where the card restrictions bite. Rakuten's answer is a Proxy Payment Service, and the way Rakuten introduces it on its own English page tells you who it is for:
Can't use your credit card on Rakuten? Can't buy that book you want? Let us take care of it.
The mechanism is cash on delivery: you choose 代金引換 at checkout, the parcel goes to the warehouse, and Rakuten Global Express pays the courier on your behalf, then bills your card for the goods plus a handling fee. Note that this is an exception Rakuten carves out of its own rules — its general guide says cash on delivery cannot be used with a forwarding address at all. The service only exists to make that one case work, and it is fenced accordingly:
| Limit | What it is |
|---|---|
| Where | Two shops only — Rakuten Books and Rakuten 24. Nowhere else, and no other e-commerce site. |
| Before you start | You must apply for the service in advance, and have completed identity verification. |
| Fee | 10% of the order including domestic shipping. Minimum ¥500. |
| Ceiling | ¥30,000 per order. A larger order has to be split. |
| Currency | Billed in yen. |
| Cards accepted | Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, Diners Club International, Discover. |
| Where it works | Every country Rakuten Global Express delivers to. |
For a complete set of a long series the ¥30,000 ceiling is the constraint that will actually shape your order. Rakuten does not spell out the consequence, so what follows is arithmetic rather than a quotation: the fee is charged per order, so an order split into three parts pays it three times — the greater of ¥500 or 10%, each time.
Rakuten Global Express offers four services. Which of them you can use depends on where you are; the table below is the general shape, and the country table after it is where the exceptions live.
| Service | Days | Weight | Carrier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super Express | 1–3 | to about 70 kg, large parcels accepted | DHL, FedEx |
| Standard Express | 4 days – 1 week | to about 30 kg | Japan Post (EMS) |
| Economy Air | within 2 weeks | to about 30 kg | Japan Post, ECMS, SF Express |
| Sea Mail | 30–90 days | to about 30 kg | Japan Post (surface) |
Rakuten publishes a fare table by weight, per country, for Standard Express, Economy Air and Sea Mail. It publishes no fare table at all for Super Express — that price comes only from its estimate tool, which we have not run. So on any route where Super Express is your only option, this site cannot tell you what shipping will cost, and neither can Rakuten's published pages.
These are the delivery estimates Rakuten prints on each country's own fee page, which differ from the general figures above. Super Express is offered to all six reachable countries.
| Country | Standard Express | Economy Air | Sea Mail | Tax Rakuten collects |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 5–10 days only above ¥410,000 | not offered | 60–90 days only above ¥410,000 | none stated |
| United Kingdom | 5–10 days | 10–20 days | 60–90 days | 20% VAT, threshold £135 |
| Australia | 5–10 days | 10–15 days | 60–90 days | 10% GST, threshold A$1,000 |
| Singapore | 3–6 days | 5–10 days | 30–60 days | 9% GST, threshold S$400 |
| New Zealand | 5–10 days | 8–13 days | not offered | 15% GST, no threshold |
| France | 5–10 days | 10–20 days | 60–90 days | none published |
| Norway | Not on Rakuten Global Express's list of countries it delivers to. | |||
Standard Express and Sea Mail to the United States carry a condition no other country's page carries: Rakuten will not use them for a parcel whose goods total is ¥410,000 or less — which it glosses itself as about US$2,500. Read it the right way round: the cheap services are reserved for large orders, and a normal book order falls under the floor, not over it. Economy Air is not offered to America at all. What is left is Super Express, which Rakuten does offer to America with no minimum attached — and for which it publishes no price.
We checked whether this floor appears anywhere else. On the fee pages for Britain, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, France, Germany and Sweden the figure ¥410,000 does not appear once. On the American page it appears seventy-three times. It is an American rule.
Norway is the one country on the suspended list where we found no way through. Rakuten Global Express publishes a list of the countries it delivers to; it holds 78 entries and Norway is not one of them. The country-fee picker on a different page holds the same 78 and does not offer Norway either. There is no country guide for Norway to read, and no fee page to look up. Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland are all there. We have no explanation for the difference — Rakuten gives none, and we are not going to invent one.
The prices in our guides are the shop price in Japan and nothing else. On this route, at least three other things are added before the parcel reaches you.
The forwarder's postage is the big one, and it depends on weight, destination and service. Consolidating several orders into one parcel is free; a number of packing options are not — waterproofing is ¥200, a reinforced international box is ¥400 to ¥800 depending on weight, priority packing is ¥1,000. If the contents are worth more than ¥200,000, Rakuten charges ¥2,800 to handle the export declaration.
Then there is tax, and the detail that surprises people: for the countries where Rakuten collects it, the tax is charged on the goods plus international postage plus the fees, not on the books alone. Rakuten adds a ¥500 tax handling fee on top of the tax itself.
Where the tax is collected depends on a line Rakuten draws. Below it — £135 for Britain, A$1,000 for Australia, S$400 for Singapore — Rakuten takes the tax when you pay for shipping, declares it on your behalf, and nothing is owed at the door. Above it, the carrier bills you at import instead. New Zealand names the same kind of line at NZ$1,000 and then says it makes no difference: the 15% is collected up front on every shipment either way. Britain's page adds one line worth reading twice — 「軽減税率は現在適用されません」, the reduced rate is not currently applied — so the figure Rakuten collects is the full 20%.
Forwarders refuse a long list of goods, and it is worth checking before you buy rather than after. Rakuten's list runs to lithium batteries, aerosols, alcohol above 25%, perfume, nail polish, hair dye, chilled and frozen food, soil and seeds, and the usual dangerous-goods categories. Books, magazines, manga, CDs and DVDs appear nowhere on it — we searched the page for each term and found none of them. The restrictions Rakuten notes on Super Express specifically are food and cosmetics, again not print.
One line on that list does deserve a manga reader's attention: obscene or immoral articles are prohibited. Rakuten does not define the term and neither will we; if a title is likely to be judged that way where you live, the risk is real and it is yours.
This section is the point of the page. A guide that only tells you what it knows is not much use for planning.
What Super Express costs. No published fare table exists. For American readers this is not a footnote — Super Express is the only service available to you for a normal book order, so the largest single number in your budget is one we cannot supply. Rakuten's estimate tool will give it to you.
Whether Super Express reaches APO, FPO and DPO addresses. An earlier version of one of our guides said Rakuten refuses military mail addresses. We could not find that anywhere on Rakuten's pages when we went back to check, and we withdrew it. Silence is not permission, though — if you use one, ask Rakuten before you order.
France's tax rate, and Germany's. Rakuten publishes tax pages for Britain, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand. For France, Germany, the United States and Norway the equivalent page does not exist — it returns an error, not an empty page. So we print no rate for them rather than a plausible one.
Why Norway is missing. No source. We looked.
Every other forwarder. Buyee, Tenso, ZenMarket and the rest may well be cheaper or may accept orders Rakuten will not. We have not measured any of them, so this page does not compare them, and an earlier version of one of our guides that named two of them as working “the same way” has been corrected.
What happens at your border. Import rules are your country's, not Rakuten's, and they change. The figures above are what Rakuten says it will collect, which is not the same as everything you might owe.
Everything above was read from Rakuten's own pages on 4 August 2026 — the Rakuten Ichiba help centre, the Rakuten Books help centre, and Rakuten Global Express's guides, country pages, fee pages and tax pages. Nothing here came from a search result or a summary.
Every figure was read at least twice, by two different means, before being printed, and that applies to the negative findings as much as the positive ones: Norway's absence was confirmed three times from two separate country lists, and the fact that books do not appear on the prohibited list was confirmed by searching the page rather than by not noticing them. Where Rakuten publishes nothing, this page prints nothing.
Prices, rates and thresholds change. This page carries the date it was measured so you can tell how stale it is, and the links go to Rakuten's own pages so you can check any line of it yourself.
| Page | What it settles |
|---|---|
| Rakuten Ichiba help — international shipping | The seven suspended countries; the stated reason; the “may be possible” wording; personal-import resale rule |
| Rakuten Books help — can you ship overseas? | Domestic delivery only; card restrictions; the pointer to Rakuten Global Express |
| Rakuten Books help — cards issued overseas | Restrictions rather than refusal, on some items and orders |
| Rakuten Global Express — how it works | The two steps; identity verification; cash on delivery not normally usable |
| Rakuten Global Express — identity verification | The 2013 legal requirement and what documents it needs |
| Rakuten Global Express — proxy payment | The two eligible shops; 10% fee, ¥500 minimum, ¥30,000 ceiling; card brands |
| Rakuten Global Express — delivery methods | The four services, their days, weights and carriers |
| Rakuten Global Express — countries served | 78 countries; Norway absent; Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland present |
| Rakuten Global Express — charges | Packing options; the ¥500 tax handling fee; the same 78-country list |
| Rakuten Global Express — goods that cannot be shipped | What is banned, and that print is not on the list |