Rdjack - nice find. Those things are often described as UK layout Minis, in reality, they're more like a United States ISO layout (If you ever plug a 105-key 'board into a computer set to the US layout, that's the layout you get)
I wonder why they made them... And why so many ended up in the hands of Japanese collectors... Who wants to ring up up Jim? =P
Btw - how easy is it to get stuff from that yahoo auctions site?
It is actually quite easy but it is going to cost you. You have to go through a buying service I use
crescent which has a very nice English interface into Yahoo Japan. Your costs are:
1) Any actual auction cost - Shipping to crescent from seller, bank transfer fees (pretty much all sellers want payment by bank transfer) some sellers cover this though, any taxes if they are due (mostly on new goods only), Your actual winning bid price.
2) Buying service fee. For all buying services this is about 10-12% of the total from above or a min of 500 yen.
3) Shipping to you from crescent. But what is nice about crescent is that they will hold anything you win for up to 3 months so you can combine your items for shipping.
4) Also payment is through Paypal only but you have to cover the paypal transfer fee. The way crescent does this is by adjusting the exchange rate by 4-5 yen or so down to cover this which makes it easer for you to figure out what something is going to actually cost you before you bid.
At one point I looked at all the buying services and they all charged about the same amount but crescent was a little more expensive but they also are one of the oldest and have great service and offer a more complete service compared to the others. For instance they are one of the only services that will act as a middle man for you if you have questions about an item. They have a form right on the Yahoo Japan interface where you can ask the seller a question they translate it and send it for you then translate the response back into English for you as well. I could go on but I really think they are the best of the available buying services out there but they are not the cheapest. Personally I would prefer to pay them a little more for the full range of services they have plus the peace of mind I have when leaving some really rare boards in there warehouse.
One thing none of them offer though is a sniping service. Why because on Yahoo Japan if a bid is placed within the last 5 min of an auction the seller has the right to extend the auction buy an hour and they can do this as many times as they want as long as a bid happens in the last 5 mins.
EDIT: Current yen to USD = 89.1821992 Current Crescent exchange rate = 83.11 so they are using the 6 yen difference to pay the paypal fee and do the actual exchange because you pay them in USD.
