Would I enjoy Pawapuro 12 or PawaMajor even though I can't read Japanese

I remember with my first Pawa's (7 and 8 "the evil~ island") there were some attempts like in GameFAQs to make something, but they never came to fruitation. Pretty sure from the activity here there will be a guide for PawaMajor due to its appeal. I played 7 and most of 8 with basic/little JP lingual ability. But with the improvement of my own JP I like and enjoy buying/playing JP games now.

I live in the US too and the only place I knew for imports (Wanpaku) stopped doing business in the states. Pretty much all JP online shops refuse to ship such items overseas. Luckily due to my JP side of my family and kind uncles I've been able to use AmazonJP to make orders (like Pawa12) which are sent to relatives and then sent over... Usually stuffed between shumai and towels.

I don't know any good priced import shops unfortunately, so I can't help you there. The above method I tended to use sparingly as I dislike burdening my relatives (consequently I only have Pawa7, 8, and 12 in the series, bought Major used at a Book-Off during a vacation to Japan recently).

Personally if I was motivated enough I would love to (and have often thought about) make a "walkthrough" for PawaPro.

I have a JP and US PS2 and use the 3 cards from them interchangably, no problems. If things on the card are specifically for some region... like the system info bit made by my JP and US machines, I don't recall for sure but my US machine only sees the JP system info as corrupt junk lol. But not a big deal really.

I use ncsx.com, but I've heard that japanvideogames.com is good too. Some people use lik-sang.com, yesasia.com, and playasia.com, but I don't. I've heard that the shipping times are bad with them. ncsx is a little bit pricier sometimes, but they're very professional and have an extensive collection. Also, if you wanna go cheaper with shipping, you can request Priority Mail shipping with them. They've done that for me before, despite being almost exclusively UPS.

I bought a DS Lite and a couple games from them recently and got it in a week via UPS Ground going from NYC to Seattle.