For various reasons, I recently embarked on a quest to get a silver Japanese kettle, also known as a ginbin (銀瓶).
I ended up hunting one down on the Japan Yahoo! Auction sites, using a proxy company to bid and pay for the kettle. And yes, I know that now is a terrible time to do so with the unfavorable exchange rate. Ah well.
Japan Yahoo! hides bidders names rather like eBay does. I noticed on various auctions that a certain set of common names kept appearing across all of them, and one in particular was winning a lot of them. Keep in mind that these kettles were ending their auction prices at anywhere from $1500-$3000.
I thought it was interesting that one person would need so many kettles. So on a hunch I took a look at the American eBay site, and noticed a vendor there is selling comparable silver kettles for about 2x what the final prices were over on Japan Yahoo!
Now, I can't definitely link anything, but the price difference exists regardless.
I'm not at all trying to knock entrepreneurship. However, I did want to warn anybody who might be interested in buying such a kettle to be careful when looking on eBay. Take a look at going prices on Japan Yahoo! or even Japanese stores to get an idea of prices, and go from there. Best of luck.