I’m going abroad to Japan for 3 weeks at the end of next month and was hoping to buy an impreza wrx or a 180sx. I’ll be spending most of my time in Kyoto so I’m hoping to find something there if not really close to the area. I would like to know how I should go about finding cars, communicating with people, and the process behind importing a car back to the US. Just anything I should know about or things I should avoid. Anything helps.
by miserable-at-best8
5 Comments
You can use websites, goonet, jdm export and a few others. The process isn’t that bad, tbh. You can also try to find a car auction and bid at one. As far as importing to the states, the process is pretty simple. Find an exporter, they’ll charge you whatever fee they charge, you’ll sign some paperwork, the car will get a shipping date and arrival date to whatever is the closest port for the exporter to send it to. Unless you want to do all the running yourself, you’ll pay for an import broker (I did) and they will handle all the paperwork to get it from the port, then you pick it up and take it to customs and the DMV. Depending on your states you might have to pay someone to translate the registration to English from Japanese ( at least in WA you do). I paid $2500 to import my Sil80, but that was 2 years ago.
My 2 cents from my own personal experience, good luck. While I have purchased several cars in Japan through the help of a broker I have never been able to deal with a Japanese car dealer by myself. The ones I’ve tried to deal with are simply not interested once they found out that I’m a foreigner. Maybe you will have more luck but my only experience with a few dealers in person have been fairly negative once it came time to actually speak with them about buying a car. Besides translating that “it is not possible” they really do not want to entertain the idea. There are obviously specialty shops who deal with foreigners and who also export cars, maybe try to find one of those in the area that you are visiting but I bet you the prices will be significantly higher. I usually just reach out to my broker if I see something interesting and they can reach out to the dealer OR get something at auction and on the plus side they know how to take care of the whole export portion of the transaction which would probably be difficult if you cannot converse in Japanese. you can check out goo-net, yahoo and carsensor for dealer and private listings.
I feel like it’s a common misconception that Japan is some sort of “jdm parade” unless you’re going to rural Japan cars are kinda on the rare side. As people in the big city’s don’t need cars. As for which car to get, If you haven’t messed with usdm Subarus or wrxs in the past I’d skip out on one of those. You need to know what you’re looking for with them, and if you can’t speak fluent Japanese I wouldn’t recommend even trying. Depending on the price you plan on paying for the car is going to determine how much you’ll need to import it back. I would bring at a minimum 5k usd on top of what you plan on paying for the car just to cover fees, and to find an importer to ship one back.
You won’t be able to just walk up to a dealer and buy a car to take home with you.
Brokers exist for a reason. Just use the normal, tried and tested process of going to a broker like Iron Chef Imports.
Importing a car isn’t as simple as see car, buy car, take car home. There’s a lot of processes you have to go through to even be able to buy it, getting it back into your own country is another story. Expect the whole process to take not less than 6 months.
Check out AllThingzJDM. I believe he’s U.S. military (currently or former) and runs a business selling cars from over there. Check out his YouTube and possibly reach out to him through his channel.