About the Company

OPAS’ founder and President, Toshiyasu Abe, started his company in 1990 with the idea to make the process of purchasing products from the US much easier for potential buyers in his native Japan. At that time, international commerce was a much more complicated undertaking for an individual consumer. There were few options for personal import, and most didn’t need or want to buy bulk quantities of items and ship them by slow-moving ocean freight. Additionally, because the Internet was nowhere near as advanced as it is today, most consumers in countries outside the US had very few resources to even determine what sort of products they could order and how to make these purchases – everything was mail order, a laboriously slow process compared to the point-and-click online shopping of today.