I am looking to start watching more Japanese movies. I wanted to know a little about what DVDs are like in Japanese. Some of my questions are, do you need a special DVD player to watch Japanese DVDs (for example are they the same size as the ones in America) Also do I need to buy a DVD player from Japan to watch Japanese DVDs/are Japanese DVDs region locked? And finally, where are the best places to buy DVDs if I am not in Japan? Thank you in advance.
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They should be the same size, but the regions are very complicated. Whether they play on your DVD player will depend on your region. The regions are also different for blu rays.
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If you’re in the Americas, you could work around it with a local bluray player. Blurays are regional, but the Americas and Japan are in the same region conveniently.
Currently, I have a Japanese bluray player and lots of American dvds. The player plays the American dvds with the interesting feature of changing to Japan’s region. So I have an animated Batman dvd that plays with Japanese subs (maybe the dub too, but idr) despite all the packaging being for the US.
My go-to recommendation is BOOKOFF Online with a proxy shipper.
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Take in mind that when buying series, the density of episodes per disk in Japan is very low (but the video quality usually is very high).
So it’s a “very expensive” “hobby”
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I have a few DVDs and Blu-rays that are Japanese. Most of mine are multi region but some aren’t. Since I’m in the UK I have a multi region player for DVD and Blu-ray that I got cheep off Amazon.
Japan is Region 2 for DVD apparently (same as UK) but they don’t actually work in my PlayStation or Xbox unless they are multi region (no idea why). Japan is region A for Blu-ray (UK is region B).
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Interesting, some of their prices are really good (looking at manga). Any proxy services you’d recommend?
https://cdjapan.co.jp/ is another option, though for shipping to America you have to order about $75+ for the costs to be worth it (at least w/ manga/books).
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Sorry, since I live in Japan, I’ve never used any proxy companies personally.
Mandarake is another company that sells used media. They ship internationally, but unlike BOOKOFF, I don’t think they consolidate their physical locations when shipping. I’m not sure what their shipping prices are like. I know a lot of folks who use CD Japan and Amazon Japan for new content.
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Their prices seemed pretty good, but their website is a nightmare, so I gave up.
I’ve been ordering stuff from https://www.suruga-ya.com/ lately, b/c they do free shipping fairly often (it seems like multiple times a month). They’re generally used, and sometimes the prices can be really great… bought the entirety of Carnival Phantasm (including S3 special edition) for 4,450円 ($30 USD), which is quite a steal!
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Re: Regions
My memory for exact details are fuzzy, but if you plan on watching the discs on a Windows computer, I believe that you can change the region of a disc drive a certain number of times (and that region can be “all region”). We lived in the UK for a while, and regions were driving me crazy, so I bought myself a very cheap external blueray drive at one point and can just use that to watch (or more accurately, rip) movies on my PC. Obviously this doesn’t help for watching with a dedicated player or a game console, but something to keep in mind.
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What software do you use for Blu-ray?
For ripping you mean? I use makemkv with the blu-ray plugin that may or may not cost extra now (I haven’t had anything to rip for a long time so I don’t know if it’s come out of beta or not).
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Surugaya can be good, but watch out if you’re European. A French friend got an order with free shipping but had to pay 40% of the value in fees for some reason
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Sounds like customs weirdness… which their site does mention. Haven’t seen anyone in Physical Media Megathread mention it, but I’ll keep that in mind in the future
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Customs can be wild. I remember sending DVDs from Europe to USA, and USA customs made me describe detailed what each disk contained and made me swear there was nothing indecent or against the USA in the contents.
I couldn’t believe the form I was filling at first…
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I’m somehow dumbfounded and not a single bit surprised 
Sorry my country is like this lol
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There is often a limit over which you have to pay duties on the item. I don’t know about France, but we had to pay VAT on anything over £25 I want to say, plus the processing fee at HMRC which was another £9 I think. Suffice it to say, it made international orders quite a bit more expensive.
Especially with somewhere that is offering free shipping, it might make sense to figure out what the value is and break up purchases to be below it.
That is an old law that goes back to when they wanted to stop (what was at that time considered) pornography distribution by making it illegal to send it through the mail.
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It also can depend on the item - for the UK books are zero rated for VAT, so they are fine even in large orders, but DVDs or CDs do have VAT and will thus get charged on entry if the sender did not charge you for and pay the VAT.
The “no tax due on low value stuff” value was £15, but in any case that rule was abolished in 2021. The value you want to stay under now is £135 because things get a lot more complicated above that (it’s the limit for “seller takes the tax from you and pays it in advance”, for instance).
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I’ve never had customs add any costs when I order stuff, I’m in Australia. I’ve heard that they only do it if you order over a thousand dollars worth of stuff at once.
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Ugh, as soon as we leave it becomes a reasonable number 
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You still have to pay tax on it, same as you did previously. The difference mainly is the new (I think multinational) setup which requires sellers in foreign countries to pre pay taxes and customs duties, which has made buying taxed items from Amazon, cdjapan, etc, much less of a hassle, but which only works for items under £135. Suruga-ya seem to still be working on the old “receiver pays” customs system: I don’t know whether they will be able to keep doing that or if they at some point will be required to change (or stop doing international sales – I suspect hon.to stopped doing international shipping because they didn’t want to deal with adding support for charging and passing on customs duties).
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