Potentially crazy question: Buying sticks and buttons straight from Sanwa?

[Alejo I]

Is there a way to do such a thing?

I know this may sound a bit batty, but I was discussing my arcade project with a friend who happens to teach at a local polytechnic and a small bulb lit upon her head out of nowhere. Turns out that her university requires joysticks for some courses and projects and she asked me if there is a way to purchase Sanwa parts in bulk. Since they'd probably pool their orders with some local schools with technical programmes, we'd be talking about purchasing over a hundred sticks and a whole bunch of buttons.

Now, if we were talking about building a few cabs I'd just direct them towards the usual places on the interwebz and call it a day, but those joysticks are going to be used in robotics projects and similar stuff, so I imagine they will be ordering a huge batch of them each course. That's a lot of orders. Apparently they've been trying to use commercial videogame controllers, but they are not very good and more often than not they require some hacking, which makes standarization a ---smurfette--- and half; hence going after a common vendor.

The question is, is it possible to contact Sanwa and buy from them in bulk? While it doesn't make a lick of sense for us hobbyist to buy our pieces from them (and I kind of imagine some Sanwa employee laughing at the notion of shipping a couple of JLFs across the globe), I imagine that it would be much more practical for my friend to contact the manufacturer instead of placing a ginormous order from an arcade shop. I've tried to find Sanwa's official website (same deal with Seimitsu), but apparently they don't operate an official website, so I'm a little lost here. Any ideas?

Edit: We can definitely purchase in bulk from IL (hell, their factory is basically one car ride away from here!) but I guess they'd like to compare prices and specs before deciding.
Edit2: Eff me sideways, they DO operate a website. It's just that the company has some comically bad Google juice so their site gets buried in the search results. Has anybody tried to purchase straight from them?