For those bored with the one we have, there is a whole other Internet out there. And people ready to help you shop it.

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In 1991, at the age of 10, I moved back from the United States to India for a year. India was then much more closed off from the rest of the world: pre-Internet and only weeks into neoliberalism. Yet compared with the kids I’d gone to school with in Austin, Tex., my classmates at the British School in Delhi were far ahead on trends; they knew what was on offer not just at the malls of America but in Dubai, Hong Kong and London. It was either a nascent globalism or a flourish of old cosmopolitanism.

Their friends and relatives, transiting home through the bright cornucopia of duty-free shops, would bring back Hershey’s Syrup, Discmans, Midol, Nike hightops, Nirvana and Public Enemy albums — real CDs, not the Indian cassettes in white clamshell cases without liner notes. Some of these treasures were available in Delhi on both the black and white markets. But I can’t recall anybody admitting to having actually bought marked-up, already-imported items. There would have been something sullied and joyless about that.

How much of your stuff came from abroad was important; it could turn the fortunes of the socially marginal child. And while certain brands had an elevated status, everything that had conquered the distance earned a measure of respect. Whether it was Rahoul’s unimpeachable Air Jordans or the unremarkable Filas chosen by Fahad’s clueless aunt, these mass-market goods from the largest mass markets on earth, once in India, became so rare as to be effectively unique. Yet you had to carry them off with ease. I caught on, and duly applied for German soccer cleats, for American T-shirts with an environmental-awareness pastel-surf yin-yang vibe and, obviously, for Swatches.

In a retail landscape where it is increasingly hard to find things that are hard to find, I have lately been returned to this sense of strangeness and delight in everyday goods. By 2012 my long enjoyment of the striped cotton smocks produced by Breton shirtmakers Saint James had become unsettled by the new ubiquity of nautical stripes on the street. Then, one day in Saint James’s New York boutique, I found a stack of tops that were stripped of stripes — simplicity fit for a 1960s Village theater director or a 1920s dissolute Pyrenean painter. The store manager said that this lone batch had arrived Stateside in error. “They’re only for Japan,” he explained.

The shrug seemed to me an ineluctably French gesture. As it happened, the brand’s Japanese web store did indeed stock the tops, but refused to ship internationally; at the weary end of a two-decade-long economic stagnation, this seemed to me a perverse gesture of xenophobia. I had looked into a wondrous, strange realm of e-commerce only to find it closed to outsiders.

My Commodore Perry turned out to be something called a proxy service. There are U.S. proxies for Canadian shoppers hoping to get the best bargains and avoid customs scrutiny, and for South Korean eBay bidders, and for the dental hygienist in Tenerife who implored me to resupply her favorite bras from Macy’s, but the art of the proxy is really all about Japan. Without a proxy, shopping on the Japanese Internet is nearly impossible; language barriers aside, if you don’t have a domestic financial presence, most shops and auctioneers will not do business with you. The genuine indifference of the enormous Japanese retail market to foreign suitors feels novel and sometimes thrilling, and utterly distinct from put-on, artificial scarcity. This is not a megabrand releasing only 200 units of some special-issue jeans; this is nobody wishing to sell you a single pair of the 20,000 available units of the megabrand’s standard-issue jeans.

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I turned up a number of forbiddingly impersonal and expensive proxy services before seeking direction from nerds on sneaker forums. The proxy service I chose is called SpeBid, run through a creaky community-style message board by a half-Japanese half-Nigerian man named Spencer (or Spe). For $30 a year plus arcane surcharges, Spe buys, bids on and reships wonderful stuff to “subscribers” all over the world. Per Jay Gatsby, “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall”; but a proxy never proffers anything you don’t already know you need.

To judge by SpeBid’s user testimonials, Spe’s clientele (also young, also male) want not obscure manga titles or anime figurines, as one might expect, but rather the influential cult street-wear brand BAPE (“A Bathing Ape”). BAPE can claim much credit for the forest of fashionable camouflage that surrounds us today. Its collections have boasted so many marquee collaborations — × Pepsi, × Dr. Martens, × SpongeBob SquarePants — that it’s difficult to believe they’re all authorized, but the supercollaboration is something the Japanese orchestrate with deftness, especially when the mash-up involves Western heritage brands: It’s not unusual to see 3 ×s, and not unheard of to see more, as in Hunter × Haversack × Maison Kitsuné × ad nauseam.

I admit to occasional seduction by these couplings: Before I found Spe, when I learned of a legendary Filson tote bag issued by sportswear-producing textile snobs Nanamica, the only way I could think to acquire it was by asking a lawyer friend to sneak away from the trial of criminal against humanity Jean-Pierre Bemba in The Hague to the Red Wing store in Amsterdam. But more interesting to me are the considered tweaks to familiar items — think of Japan’s tendency to embrace Americana and reproduce it and improve on it, as with the hamburger patty’s guest appearance in the bento box. Many Japanese North Face backpacks, in contrast to the Stateside roster, appear to have been built for the uses to which they will actually be put — hauling laptops and books and exercise gear — rather than for special-forces sorties in the Hindu Kush. Similar tweaks are evident in mid-thigh men’s Speedo trunks, which in Japan have contouring seams along the groin to provide a fit that’s closer to that of a bikini brief and have been offered — fleetingly, as part of fall/winter and spring/summer changeovers — in trompe l’oeil prints that look like plaid flannels, heathered gray sweatshirt cloth and assorted washes of denim. There are rainbow swim slips you are meant to wear under your swim trunks, rainbow color-block daypacks from Kelty, rainbow basket-weave Nikes. And solid Saint James tops in a vast prismatic range, from ecru to plum to a pale blue called RAF (my favorite). Franchise agreements officially forbid these local iterations from being distributed elsewhere, like the now quaintly ineffectual DVD region scheme. In that and so many other ways, the charm of the merchandise is inseparable from the difficulty of the shopping, for even with a proxy it isn’t always easy. If you Google Translate a web page, especially on Yahoo! Auctions (which in Japan beat out eBay), the results are not always helpful: “scratches and dirt is ordered and without beauty goods,” advises the seller of a lightly used parka. “Item is 8/10 condition,” Spe explains. To sign up for mailing lists, you may need to register for an account and pass the prove-you’re-not-a-robot tests, in Japanese. Aside from the market-dominating web-store platform Rakuten, numerous stand-alone .jp sites with slightly-too-good-to-be-true prices are just scams, run from China. And, of course, no returns.

In the context of our familiar online marketplaces, where risk has been all but ironed out, the guesswork and the tricky bookkeeping and the trust-based grappling that go into proxy shopping may digitally approximate the auto-da-fé of queueing on a sidewalk for eight hours. But delving into this other web and its bounty feels more like the relief and immediate swell of acceptance experienced by New Yorkers when we discover entire extra rooms hidden in our apartments, before we wake from the dream.

It’s the opposite of a hack. There is a catalytic magic, like silver-process photography, always expected yet always surprising, when a package shows up manifesting the junk you saw in low-res miniature and asked a stranger to buy. These experiences have sometimes recalled for me the reverent appreciation I had at the dawn of my commercial consciousness. They recall as well an earlier stage of childhood in which any object — a plush velveteen frog, my father’s grape scissors — could achieve an aura of perfection. When Plato says that beautiful things are difficult, that’s a rule for adults.