Shopping at Treasure Fest Online for newbies

Treasure Fest Online is an event where sculptors can sell their works under the One Day License online to buyers. Due to licensing however, these are only intended to be sold within Japan. This is a guide created with English speaking foreigners in mind who are interested in participating!

Last updated 21/Oct/24
-Revamped article to better reflect the times

Treasure Festival (or トレフェス/Trefes) has been a long running hobby event held in Ariake Japan where people come together to sell their self made Garage Kits and other toys or hobby items. The in person event has been replaced with this online alternative in 2020. Dates and times for upcoming events are posted on their Homepage.

This guide will cover registration to TFO, Membership requirements…

To participate in the event, the following are required:

1. A Forwarding service
   • This is a service like Tenso or Blackship which provide you with an address within Japan to ship your items to.
   • There are fees for these services so note to check them before you use them. You’ll also be required to send a form of ID to the service due to certain Japanese laws on exportation.
   • Do NOT use a proxy service like Buyee, FromJapan or Zenmarket. These platforms are not appropriate for this event as they only operate on specific working hours and need a purchased ticket to access the event.
2. One of the following card types:

• Many of my international friends have reported being able to use their cards including from Australia and the US. If you’ve been able to buy from sites like Amiami or Mandarake, you’re likely okay.

First head to tfo.hobima.com. To register a “hobima” account. This will enable you to enter TFO. Bring your Japanese address from your forwarding service to the following menu then click the Blue button at the bottom of the page to accept the terms and conditions. Using Google Translate is very helpful for this… I tend to use the Google Chrome browser when partaking as the native auto translate feature is much less intrusive than using the Translate site.

DeepL is a service I’ve found to be more accurate, however you need to manually feed it the information vs Google Translate which will translate a page in full.

Next you will be greeted with a signup screen. The following details what each section is for:

Type your name in the first box to match what you’ve given your forwarder then in the next box, “furigana” will be required. This is used for reading kanji accurately in a regular Japanese name. Your name is easy to generate using an online tool (I used this) Once converted, your name should be accepted by the system! If errors occur complaining about “kana”, remove any spaces added by the tool.

Finalise these details, click the registration link in the email that will appear in your inbox from hobima/TFO and you’re all set! Navigate to the Top page again and Login

Once logged in, if an event is beginning soon, a box will appear that will take you to buy tickets.