koitsu wrote:
The only other option is to use one of the many Japanese auction sites and rely on a... hrm, what are they called... well there's a term for them but I can't remember. Basically there's an "agent" or "company" that will buy things from Japanese auction sites on your behalf (for a fee) and then send them to you. Most Japanese people won't ship out-of-country, hence why these "agents" exist. Again, there's a term for them, I just can't remember what it is right now. You might get a better price using that method, but sometimes the fees can be expensive; it varies heavily.
I've not heard of "the many Japanese auction sites" - I only know that the biggest (and only noteworthy) one is Yahoo! Auctions Japan (often referred to as YAJ). The "agents" are usually called a "proxy bid service" or "bid agent", and there are a few which charge varying amounts of commission. There's a
Google Docs spreadsheet which compares them and has some meaningful notes on some of the services.
That said, when I was looking for my AV Famicom I didn't exactly get the impression they were that hard to find or particularly expensive on eBay. I found a practically mint condition AV Famicom (without box) for €165 including shipping. I'm not up to speed on what the going price of these is supposed to be but I didn't find it a particularly expensive purchase considering the amazing condition. The console itself hasn't yellowed at all (the top is the exact same colour as the bottom / inside). The dogbone controllers did show yellowing but it was trivial to Retr0bright them, and I happened to be Retr0brighting arcade stick cases anyway so I just did them along with that batch.
My advice for looking on eBay (for anything, really -- not just consoles or Famicoms in particular) is to use the most generic search term you can think of (so if you want a Famicom console, just search for "famicom", nothing more). Select worldwide sellers, and sort by price + shipping, lowest first. In the case of pricier items you can set a minimum price of like $50 to avoid having to trawl through pages and pages worth of $5 Famicom games. It will still take some time to go through all the listings for rarer game cartridges, accessories, etc.; but my experience shows that the best bargains are usually very poorly listed with very few keywords. So the more you add to your search terms, like "console" or model numbers like "HVC-101", the more likely you are to miss out on that one dude who just wants to sell his console for a reasonable price.