Supporting the artists
Otokonoko/cross-dressing is a small niche even within Japan. I believe it’s rare for manga in this genre to sell enough to appear on the oricon charts.
Amachin has sold over 350.000 copies, but I don’t remember any other series selling this much.
Because of this, there aren’t a lot of otokonoko/cross-dressing mangas. Not when you compare to other niche genres like BL and Yuri.
And unfortunately, because it’s such a small niche, there are only a handful of mangas that get official releases. If they don’t sell that much in Japan, it’s hard for them to get an official English release.
The artists need our support. So, even if you don’t understand Japanese, if you can, please consider buying the mangas. It’s the only way we can help them and the genre.
Thinking of this, I made this guide so you can either buy the physical or the digital copies of otokonoko/cross-dressing mangas.
Here you’ll find stores you can buy from Japan. I’ve been using a few of them for years and never had any trouble.
To buy physical volumes
The site is in English, so probably won’t have any trouble setting up an account. And you can pay with Paypal, so it’s a bonus.
You can find pretty much all of the new releases here. And you can also check how much shipping will be without proceeding to the checkout.
If there’s an item that isn’t on the site, you can check their JP site (NEOWING) and ask their customer support to put the item on CDJapan. They only take a couple of days to do it.
They also offer a proxy service. For a fee, they’ll look the out of print item for you. You can find more about it here (link)
I’ve been buying from them for almost ten years now. I highly recommend them, especially because you won’t pay Japanese taxes.
The site has an English version, but you need a different email from the US Amazon. Otherwise you might lose your original account. And as far as I know, you can’t use Paypal, so it’s a minus.
Personally, I haven’t bought manga from Amazon JP. Most of the manga doesn’t ship to my country (they do ship texts books. Weird)
But I think they ship normally to North America and Europe.
Also, a friend of mine said you can buy the digital volumes without any problem. So if you don’t want to pay the shipping, you can support the author by buying the digital version.
The site is in English. I bought from them only once. From what I remember, it was a bit more expensive than other sites. But you can find items from China and Korean as well.
If you know any other site, please tell me so I can include in this guide.
Buying from smaller stores (You can also buy out of print manga and from Yahoo Japan)
For this, you need proxy services.
CDJapan has one, Rakuten has one as well (I’m trying to figure out, but it’s a bit hard and you need to know Japanese, so I can’t recommend)
There are others, but the only one I use so far is Zenmarket
It’s in English, so setting up an account is easy. You can use Paypal, so it’s a plus. Here you can buy from Rakuten, AmazonJP, Melonbooks, Toranoana, Animate, Yahoo auctions and pretty much every Japanese store. All you need is the link to the item.
With Zenmarket, you can buy store exclusive goods. (I bought Amachin special edition with the poster on Melonbook)
They charge U$3 per item, so it can get pricey when you add the Japanese shipping and tax, so watch out. They offer multiple types of shipping and to everywhere.
If you know another proxy service and use it regularly, please tell me so I can include it here.
Buying digital manga.
I can’t buy it from AmazonJp because of where I live, but depending where you are, you can.
The site is in Japanese. And it doesn’t accept Paypal. Here’s the link to create an account
I buy from them from time to time, stuff that I can’t get it because AmazonJP doesn’t like my country. You can read on their online reader.
Since there’s the language barrier, please pay attention to the instructions on the link.
I don’t know how much I can help, but if you have any doubts, please talk to me.
If you can, please consider buying the Japanese manga to show support to the authors and the genre. They need us more than you can imagine.
Otokonoko News 