Wow thats sweet that they ship it for free. I would just forget about the household goods altogether and import all the ones I could

I would asume they are way cheaper over their since the cabs are everywhere right?
No.

I when I first started to look for a cab, I went to Akihabara to look for some cabs for sale. G-front had a few and they were not in best of shape nor clean. Same with mak-jap, and they wanted a full grand in YEN! Now back then the $ was a lot stronger then the YEN, so that wasn't really the issue. But no way was I to pay top YEN for something not up to par. Japanese are real good about keeping things pristine and these places were not doing so.
Finally after some forum searching I ran into a guy in Japan who gave me some contact numbers and a couple e-mails to this arcade warehouse, it was also a lot closer to where I lived. I lived near Yokohama, and this place was in Kawasaki, vice a long trip to Tokyo. So I get invited to the warehouse to look over a few cabs and out of 2-3 Blast Cities, I picked one and tested it out.
They told me they would clean if from the inside out and have it delivered to me in about 3 days. I went on a Monday, and Wednesday after work I had them deliver it to me. It was $1,000 including S&H to the inside of my house. They re-assembled it and showed me all the ins and outs of the machine. Gave me the keys and the original instruction manual.
Back in '08 I would say I got it for about $800 with the awesome YEN conversion back then. Now?!! LOL If you were to get one out there you had better TRY to haggle with them and use the YEN exchange as a valid excuse. Japan however is hard to bargain with unless you know some locals or people who know them. Unlike the other places in Asia you can't use the walk away method, they are real solid on whatever they say they want. But what's there to lose if you try?
Another thing... They could be more lean on the price since these candy cabs are slowly being phased out for the newer HD cabs. All the newer games right now need HD. As good as the tri-sync monitors are, they still don't display the newer games properly. They are mostly used for shooters that are still being made, along with regular sprite games or classics.