Does Buying Japanese Cards and Selling Them in America Still Work?

By CardSpicy Founder · October 6, 2026

Quick answer

CardSpicy indexes cards, so the honest form of this question is arithmetic rather than opinion. Buying a card in Japan and selling it in America has to clear four separate costs before it clears anything at all: freight, the 15 percent US import charge that replaced the old exemption, the marketplace selling fee, and the price gap itself. On the most recent full-market count we have, 392 of 71,076 card and grade combinations were cheaper in Japan at all, and only 7 cleared every gate on the same day.

A price gap is not a margin. The margin is what is left after three fees, and on most cards nothing is left.

The four gates

Walk through them in order, because a trip that fails at the first one does not need the other three.

1. The gap. The Japanese price has to be below the Western price after both are read on a comparable basis — same card, same grade, same condition band, same window of sales.
2. Freight. Shipping a card from Japan to the United States is a flat cost whatever the card is worth, which means it weighs far more heavily on a cheap card than on an expensive one. The figure used here is $14.00.
3. The import charge. The de minimis exemption that used to let small parcels in free has been removed, and a 15 percent charge now applies to the declared value. On a $12 card that is $1.91; on a $31 card it is $4.72.
4. The selling fee. Selling on a marketplace costs a percentage of the sale price, so it scales with the card. At the rate used here it is roughly 14 to 15 percent of the Western price.

Two of those four are flat or near-flat and two are proportional, which is why the answer changes with card value. A cheap card is squeezed by freight; an expensive card is squeezed by the fee and the tax. The middle is where a trip can work, and the middle is narrow.

The shipping mechanics themselves — what a parcel from Japan actually costs now, and what the charges are called at the border — are set out in shipping to the US after de minimis, which is the companion piece to this one.

A trip that does not clear

The clearest way to see the effect is to follow one card all the way through. This is a real pair of medians from a full-market brief dated 4 October 2026, not a constructed example.

The card is about 111 percent more expensive in the United States than in Japan, which sounds like a trade and is not one. The gap is $14.07 a copy. Freight alone is $14.00, and the tax and the fee are larger than the remaining seven cents. The trip loses money before anything goes wrong, and the reason is simple: on a $12 card, a flat $14 shipping charge is more than the entire spread.

A trip that does clear

The same four gates, applied to a graded card instead of a raw one.

This one clears, and it clears only because the card is graded. The gap is proportionally smaller than the raw example, but the absolute spread is far larger, and that is what makes the difference: a flat $14 freight charge is 45 percent of the Japanese price on the raw card and 45 percent on this one too, but the dollar amount it has to be covered by is two and a half times bigger.

There is a second reason a graded card travels better, and it is not about the arithmetic. A PSA 10 is a defined, countable thing. Our comparison of PSA 10 and PSA 9 pricing sets out how much of a card’s value sits in the grade alone, and the population report explains why two copies of the same card in the same grade are not necessarily comparable. Both matter when you are matching a Japanese sale to an American one, because a mismatch in grade is not a price gap at all — it is two different products.

Why the hit rate is so low

The numbers are worth stating plainly, because they are the whole answer. Across 71,076 card and grade combinations with real recorded sales on at least one side in a 30-day window:

• 392 cleared every gate except the fees — meaning they were genuinely cheaper on one side after looking at the price alone. Of those, 267 were cheaper in Japan and 125 were cheaper in the West.
• 7 cleared everything, including freight, the import charge and the selling fee, on that day’s medians.

So the second filter is the brutal one. Most of the 392 gaps are too small to survive a flat shipping charge, and the ones that are large enough tend to be on cards expensive enough for the proportional fees to eat the difference. The headroom sits in a band, and the band is thin. A count of 7 out of 71,076 is not a market; it is an exception that has to be found rather than assumed.

Where the data is weakest

One caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote, because it limits how precisely any of the above can be read. In the raw-card example, 28 of the 38 Japanese sales came from marketplaces that do not publish a sale date. For those rows, the 30-day window is the period in which the sale was recorded, not the period in which it sold.

The two medians are still real prices from real sales. What cannot be claimed is that they are dated to the day. For a card where 74 percent of one side’s data carries that qualification, the gap is a direction rather than a precise figure, and a reader should treat it that way. The same caution applies to any Western median built on a handful of sales: three or five sales is a small sample, and one outlier can move it.

What has to be true for a trip to work

Four conditions, and with the current charges, all four have to hold at once.

1. The absolute gap has to exceed roughly $20. Freight plus the import charge is a fixed floor of about $15 to $16 before the selling fee is counted. Below that, there is nothing to win.
2. The card has to be worth shipping. A card expensive enough for a $20 gap to exist is usually expensive enough for the proportional fees to be significant, which is why the band is narrow.
3. Both sides have to be measured on the same product. Same grade, same condition band, same printing. A Japanese raw price against an American PSA 10 price is not a gap.
4. Time has to be free. Freight and turnaround mean the money is out of your hands for weeks, and a card’s price can move in that window. Nothing in the arithmetic above accounts for that.

This is also why the same logic applies to the other direction. Selling Japanese cards into America and Chinese printings into America are both subject to the same four gates, and the language question adds a fifth consideration that is not about cost at all. What to collect across Japanese, English and Chinese cards covers that side of it.

Frequently asked questions

Is buying Japanese cards and selling them in the US still profitable?

For a small number of cards, yes. On the most recent full-market count, 392 of 71,076 card and grade combinations were cheaper on one side after price alone, and 7 cleared freight, the 15 percent import charge and the selling fee on the same day. Most gaps are smaller than the flat cost of shipping a parcel.

Why did it get harder?

Because the import charge changed. The de minimis exemption that used to admit low-value parcels free has been removed, so a 15 percent charge now applies, and it applies on top of a flat shipping cost that was always there. Two of the four gates a trip has to clear are now fixed or near-fixed costs.

Does grading a card change the answer?

It can, because grading raises the absolute gap while freight stays flat. In the pair of examples here, a raw card with an 111 percent price gap lost $5.79, while a PSA 10 with a smaller proportional gap made $5.83. The card that worked did so because the dollar spread was larger, not because the percentage was.

How much profit do I need to cover the costs?

Roughly $20 of absolute gap as a floor, since shipping and the import charge together come to about $15 to $16 before the marketplace fee is counted. That is a rule of thumb rather than a threshold, because the fee scales with the sale price and the import charge scales with the declared value.

Where does the price data come from?

The medians quoted here are from a daily market brief that publishes Japanese and Western sale figures side by side, dated 4 October 2026. A large share of the Japanese sales in those figures come from marketplaces that do not publish a sale date, so the window is when the sale was recorded rather than when it happened.

Sources

Sources and scope

1. A daily card market brief publishing Japanese and Western sale medians side by side, dated 4 October 2026 — used for the two worked examples, the four cost lines and the 71,076 / 392 / 7 counts.
2. The same brief’s data-provenance notes — that 28 of 38 Japanese sales in the raw-card example come from marketplaces that publish no sale date.
3. United States customs and import-charge basis for low-value parcels, as reflected in the 15 percent figure used in both examples.
4. Marketplace selling-fee basis, as reflected in the per-sale fee lines used in both examples.
5. Our own pages on shipping after de minimis, on PSA 10 versus PSA 9 pricing and on population reports, used for the internal links and for the grade-comparability point.
6. Scope note: the figures here are secondary-market observations at the date cited and move quickly. Nothing on this page is a valuation or an investment recommendation, and CardSpicy quotes no prices of its own.

A price gap is not a margin. Freight, the import charge and the selling fee are all real costs, and a card that clears them on one day’s medians may not clear them on the next.

Related reading

• Shipping to the US After De Minimis
• PSA 10 vs PSA 9: The Price Gap on Simplified Chinese Cards
• The PSA Population Report, Explained
• Is It Worth Grading Your Cards? A Cost-versus-Value Breakdown
• PSA vs BGS vs CGC: Which Grader, and Why It Matters
• Japanese, English or Chinese Cards: Which to Collect
• Three Cards Worth Owning in Japanese
• How One Piece Card Value Is Read

Where to go next

• The CardSpicy card index — every card we track, with its PSA 10 population and market history (195 cards).
• The illustrator index — every artist behind those cards, card by card (110 artists).