Anime Conventions in Japan

In the past Wonderfest was a great place to hunt for cels and try to obtain deals from unwitting sellers. The problem is now with many sellers they try their hand at YJP as well.

Since you are also searching for cels for series mainly from the 80s, if you have time and the monies I'd try visiting various Mandarake stores. But before you go seriously do some research to see if the stores even carry dated and non-mainstream anime cels. When I last went in Nov 2005 I didn't see any of the series you collect in the stores. Perhaps you will have more luck.

Mahoro's correct. Wonderfest was a great place for hard to find 80's cels, but dealers have wised up and will list those sort of cels on YJ. Cels from the 80's are pretty rare now, not that many of them are showing up, and when they do, they're not cheep anymore.

I've been to Japan twice looking for cels and I haven't found anything. It doesn't help that I don't speak Japanese and I'm looking for cels from shows that few Japanese people have ever heard of or would even recognize. I was suprised even asking about GoLion cels would get a strange look in anime shops.

YJ is the source for Thundercats cels. There's one seller who's listed a ton, that's where a lot of collectors and dealers have gotten their cels recently. Mandarake is a good source for Voltron cels, they tend to list them on eBay too.

I was in Japan last year, and I checked one of the Mandarake chains in Tokyo for Transformers cels and other 80s shows. The closest thing I found was Macross. One shop did have a folder designated for Transformers cels, but it was totally empty :(

Sadly Mandarake will not have any of the good high end items in their stores available for regular sale. Those items are held for the online auctions and/or the Zenbu. As more and more stores become well versed in the international market, your options are pretty much the following: 1) wait and hope something good shows up in the regular auctions and big auction Zenbu, 2) hunt YJP 24/7 like the obsession requires, and/or 3) buy from certain dealers with larger pull in Japan and internationally.

You should note as more and more people sell online, the competition for the cel resell market is becoming stiffer for the older anime series and the dealers/individual collectors trying to obtain them. Having said that, most of the existing dealers in the USA will eventually go out of business -you can count on this- it is just a question of how soon. I firmly believe eventually the largest players in the cel resell business will come down to two players, Mandarake and AnimeLink.