I've never paid customs fees for anything being shipped to me from japan. I am in the Chicago area.
I'm in the Chicago area as well and have not been hit with any custom fees on any one particular package.
With that said, I bought a lot of import video games/system stuff from Japan back in 2013 off ebay and other overseas vendors....all of the items came with a customs tag fixed to the outside of the package. I ended up getting a letter from the state of Illinois asking me to print off my ebay and amazon.com purchase history and mail it to them. They came up with about $300.00 in state sales taxes that I owed. not sure if all the customs tags tipped them off or it was just from Amazon.com purchases.
All thanks to our state senator Dick Durbin, who actively pursued taxing all of our online out-of-state purchases here in Illinois.