Very good news for us English speakers who just love to blow paychecks on figures and whatever else.

From ANN:

Yahoo! Japan Corp. and eBay Inc. announced on Tuesday that the two companies will link their online auction services, and thus give American bidders easier access to Japanese auctions, and vice-versa. Although eBay is the dominant online auction service in many countries including the United States and Canada, it fell so far behind Yahoo’s Japanese auction service that eBay pulled out of the Japanese market in 2002.

Yahoo Auctions Japan is best known in the anime/manga community for its wide variety of manga, anime, and character goods. As of Tuesday afternoon, it lists 14,592 Gundam items, 6,927 Naruto items, 4,796 Sailor Moon items, and 6,824 anime cels. For non-Japanese speakers who want to buy items on Yahoo Auctions Japan, a cottage industry of proxy buyers have sprung up in the last eight years. For a fee, a proxy service would handle all the bidding, payments, and overseas shipping for people living outside Japan. If Yahoo! Japan and eBay successfully execute their linkup plans, eBay will effectively become the proxy service for Yahoo! Japan, and vice-versa.

In the first phase, the two companies have already launched a website which will translate international eBay auctions into Japanese and help Japanese speaker deal with payment and shipping.

In the second phase that is scheduled for March, Japanese speakers can directly bid on international eBay items from within the Yahoo Auctions Japan website.

In the third phase that is scheduled for the middle of 2008, the two companies will launch a site by which American eBay users can directly bid on Japanese Yahoo auctions.

Let’s face it. Living on the right end of the Pacific Ocean sucks for those who take an interest and indulge in a hobby that is based in Japan, especially when it comes to goods. Product availability is far from bad, but knowing what else is out there does make one jealous of those who can easily access it (i.e., those who can read Japanese). Proxy bidding has been around, but I’d personally like to do bidding and buying myself, not to mention save myself the fees involved with having to go through a middle-person.

Although I’ve been good to go with HobbyLink Japan, CDJapan, Hobby Search, Amazon (US), eBay, and whatever random online stores are out there, there is simply more available that I cannot access. If anything, this linking will increase the availability of certain products and allow more buyers in North America access to used/secondhand goods. As things are now, searching for more hard-to-find stuff on eBay is a chore. Items are limited and there is a ridiculous amount of bootleg crap out there. If this works out between Yahoo Japan and eBay, it’ll only be helpful.

Maybe now I’ll finally track down that damn Movic 1/8 Fate figure from last year…