Being otaku in the Lost Decade

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Hello frens, please share your experiences about otaku culture in the 1990s. I have been researching this matter and found very little information through the internet, so I find it pertinent to make a thread to share things about it. The first thing I would like to ask is in regards to obtaining material. Starting with visual novels and dating simulators. How did you get them back then? Surely it wasn't as easy as today, so how? Did you have to travel to Japan and buy them on a physical store? What shipping mechanisms were there (if any)? Another question I have refers to anime. Did Japan have the equivalent of Block Buster but exclusively for animation? Say I wanted to buy videotapes of a raw 80s anime, all episodes. Would that be possible? And finally, dakimakuras. I heard they started being a thing at that point of time, so how would you acquire them? In summary, let us pretend I was a clearly underage kid in that lost decade, would Japanese media retailers sell adult content to a gaijin kid? Yes, no? If no, how could I get around it? If there is anything you'd like to talk about but wasn't asked please go ahead. Thank you for contributing to this thread in advance.