Most of us have our own little hobbies, whether it's collecting cards, DVDs or even action figures. My own passion is collecting Japanese B2 gaming posters. Japanese B2 posters measure roughly around 20 X 28, a common size for a lot of video game and movie promotional posters. You would normally find these posters hung up in front of game stores in Japan.
The quality of these Japanese gaming posters compared to the posters I've gotten from places like New York Comic Con are second to none. Almost every Japanese poster I bought uses great quality paper, sometimes even comes in a nice glossy finish, and is pretty sturdy (unlike my Comic Con posters which feel very fragile or bland in comparison).
My first Japanese poster I purchased was on Ebay and the game was called Battle Stadium D.O.N., which is a crossover fighting game (a pretty bad one at that) between characters from Naruto, Dragon Ball Z and One Piece universes. I spent $70 for that one poster and then maybe another $15 for shipping, but later realized was a rip off since Japan sells these posters for about $2-$50 each in some Japanese shops, depending how rare they are. Despite that mishap, I went on collecting my favorite fighting and anime game posters such as Naruto, One Piece, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter and so on, which you can see in the gallery below.
There are three websites I use to purchase my posters. The first website is called Tarobitz, which where I got some of my PlayStation 2 posters as well as my Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4 poster. Their posters average a little over $16 and the shipping is another $10-$15 or so.
The second website I use, more often than the first, is Buyee. Buyee is a middle man service that allows you to buy what other Japanese people are auctioning and when you win the bid they store the item in their warehouse and you pay for the shipping price to have it sent to your house after their warehouse receives it. It's also handy to keep a yen to dollar tab open in your browser (I use Google's currency converter for better estimates) so you know how much you're bidding in yen.
In order to search for a game poster of your choosing on the search bar you would want to type it in Japanese. The word "poster" in Japanese translates to "ポスター" and a trick to find the game you like is to look for the game's Wikipedia page, since it usually has the Japanese title. So for example, if I wanted to find a Kingdom Hearts B2 poster I would go to the Wikipedia page, reference the first paragraph and pull out the title's name written in Japanese. In this case, it would translate to "キングダム ハーツ."
The last website I go on to find posters is Ebay but honestly I wouldn't spend more than $30 for a poster there. There are some people who take advantage and sell a common poster for $60 or $70. Other than that though you may find some great Japanese posters that you may not find on Buyee. Unlike Buyee you don't have to type it in Japanese; instead you generally just type in "20 x 28 poster" or "B2 poster."
After I got several of my favorite posters, I began to explore other genres. Even if I didn't like the games in particular, there's just something about the way these posters are designed that really stand out and scream "buy me." RPGs like Final Fantasy XIII, Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix and Dragon Quest -- along with other series of that genre -- have really great looking posters so I decided to pick some of those up as well.
I currently have over 200 posters in my collection and the number has been slowly growing ever since. I want to eventually hang a couple of these up but there are too many to choose from. One thing for sure is that I will be definitely framing this Super Smash Bros. Melee poster soon.
If you like what you see, check out the rest of my poster collection here: