Recommend a kokugo jiten?

I want to cross the line in Japanese fluency where I don't define Japanese in terms of English anymore, but begin to think of new Japanese words or grammar in terms of more basic Japanese. But the j-j dictionaries that I've seen are a bit---shall we say---intimidating. Maybe a jiten targetted to younger Japanese would be a good fit?

Do any of you have any thoughts on this question that you could share with me?:jama:

What would you say your level of Japanese would be if you were a native speaker?

These books, although not actually kokugo jiten might be useful as a first step towards weaning yourself off from English based dictionary. I used them for that purpose, although I must admit that I found it annoying that a lot of the words that I wanted to look up (from reading Endo Shusaku's books) were not in them. Of course you could say that this fact pushed me towards the next level: Japanese-English dictionaries written for Japanese native speakers. From there I went to the next step of using kokugo jiten on a regular basis.

Good luck!

Amazon.com: Kodansha's Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary (9784770027511): Masatoshi Yoshida, Yoshikatsu Nakamura: Books
Amazon.com: Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary: Japanese-English English-Japanese (9784770024800): Masatoshi Yoshida, Yoshikatsu Nakamura: Books

there are a some kokugojiten available online... like
dictionary[dot]goo[dot]ne[dot]jp or
www[dot]sanseido[dot]net
(i'm not allowed to put URLs in... ^^; )

I'm using a german-japanese online dictionary, which automatically includes findings from kokugojisho daijirin + daijisen and the japanese wikipedia... maybe there's something like this for english too?