Nendoroid at 20: the parts-only (特典のみ) market is how Japanese collectors finish a figure for

Nendoroid turned twenty this February (first release February 2006, numbering now past #3100), and the anniversary pushed me to finally sort out a shelf of half-complete figures. In doing that I found a corner of the Japanese second-hand market that I had never seen discussed in English: listings that are not a Nendoroid at all, just the bonus part. Posting what I learned, with the exact listings I read this morning (17 September, Japanese marketplace via a forwarder) so the numbers are real rather than remembered.

The word: 特典のみ

特典 (tokuten) is the pre-order bonus - the extra face plate, the mini food, the special stand - that a specific Japanese retailer or the Good Smile shop attaches to a Nendoroid. のみ means "only". Put together, 特典のみ is a listing where the seller kept the figure and is selling just the bonus. Every such listing I read says the same thing in the description, in almost the same words: ねんどろいど本体は付属しません, "the Nendoroid body itself is not included". Read that line before you buy, in both directions - it is a trap if you thought you were getting the figure, and exactly what you want if you already own it.

What the parts cost right now

- Kaede (Nijisanji) - bonus display base only, no bag, seller rates it "damage or stain": 800 yen ($5.52)
- Kirby - the Good Smile official-shop bonus Maxim Tomato, sealed, body not included: 1,500 yen ($10.35)
- Yuta Okkotsu (Jujutsu Kaisen 0 Ver.) - the serious-face plate, sealed, bonus only: 1,999 yen ($13.79)
- Yoshikage Kira (JoJo) - the bonus cat-grass (猫草) part, sealed, figure not included: 3,000 yen ($20.70)

So the rarest piece of a figure you already own is a 800-3,000 yen problem instead of a rebuy-the-whole-thing problem. That is the entire point of this post.

And the sealed back catalogue, for scale

Same morning, same marketplace, all described as unopened:

- Draken #1813 (Tokyo Revengers), sealed: 2,100 yen ($14.49)
- Mikudayo #299, unopened, box wear noted: 2,860 yen ($19.73)
- Rengoku #1541 (Demon Slayer), sealed: 3,999 yen ($27.59)
- Denji #1560 (Chainsaw Man), unopened, still in the Amazon packaging so the box may be slightly warped: 4,200 yen ($28.98)
- Hatsune Miku RQ Ver. #75 - the 2009 Good Smile Racing personal-sponsor bonus, the early version with the white car: 4,200 yen ($28.98)
- Meta Knight #669, the re-re-release packaging, unopened: 5,170 yen ($35.67)
- Seto Kaiba (Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters), unopened: 5,500 yen ($37.95)
- Kurisu Makise & Mayuri Shiina #197, Cheering Ver., the two-figure set: 10,000 yen ($69.00)

Against Good Smile's own current list prices of roughly 7,300-8,900 yen for a new numbered Nendoroid, most of the sealed few-years-old stuff sits at about half. The two outliers are instructive: the Miku RQ is a sponsor bonus that never had a retail price, and #197 is from the first two hundred numbers and simply is not stocked anywhere. Those are the ones where "wait for a re-release" is the only alternative to paying.

Why the international store cannot do this for you

Good Smile does ship abroad, and for current pre-orders that is the easy route. But by their own user guide, pre-orders are charged shipping per item type, so four pre-orders across four months can be four shipping charges; and structurally the store cannot sell kuji-prize Nendoroids, event/pop-up exclusives, retailer bonus parts, or anything out of print. The parts-only market exists only domestically, because it is collectors selling to collectors.

Searching

Search in hiragana: ねんどろいど, not "Nendoroid" - English-titled listings are the ones already priced for export. Add 特典のみ for parts, or the figure's number for a specific release (the number is the only unambiguous identifier once a character has a 2.0, a school-uniform ver. and a kuji variant). Condition words that matter: 新品未開封 sealed, 開封済み opened, 箱なし no box, 欠品 missing parts - that last one is the killer on a figure that is basically a bag of small parts.

If you are buying several, use a forwarder that holds and consolidates - Nendoroid boxes are small and light, so the fifth figure in a parcel costs almost nothing to ship while the first carries all the postage. The Mercari-side service fee on the one I use is a flat 300 yen per item, which is why a 800 yen stand is still worth buying through it.

The longer write-up with the anniversary programme (Nendoroid Day, the Japan tour, the fan-voted Rerelease Summit), the store-vs-store comparison table and the fee breakdown: Nendoroid (2026): the 20th anniversary, Japan-only kuji prizes and bonus parts, and the cheapest way to buy from Japan

And the live search I used for the parts listings above: ねんどろいど 特典のみ listings on the Japanese marketplace right now - usual disclosure, it goes through the forwarding service I buy with; treat it as a price reference.

Question for the room: does anyone keep a list of which retailer got which bonus face for a given number? I can find the parts, but working out whether the "serious face" I want was the AmiAmi bonus or the Good Smile shop bonus is still trial and error.

How to tell a first-printing manga (初版) from a reprint, and what Dragon Ball / One Piece / AKIRA

If you collect Japanese tankobon, the word that changes the price is 初版 (shohan, first printing) - and the only place it is proven is the colophon (奥付) on the last page. A real first shows a single 第1刷発行 date; a reprint lists 第2刷, 第15刷 and so on underneath with later dates. The second thing is the obi (帯), the paper band around the cover: most copies lost it in the first month, so 帯付き copies of an old volume 1 go for several times the bare book.

What the same volumes are actually listed for in Japan right now (asking prices, first printings, read on 16 September 2026): Dragon Ball vol.1 (Sep 1985) ¥150,000-190,000; One Piece vol.1 (Dec 1997) ¥50,000-250,000; Naruto vol.1 ¥15,999-118,000; Demon Slayer vol.1 ¥8,000-90,000 (the ¥90,000 copy has the first-print obi and flyer, the ¥8,000 ones do not); Death Note vol.1 ¥3,500-50,000; AKIRA vol.1 (Kodansha KC Deluxe) ¥9,000-38,010; Hunter x Hunter vol.1 ¥6,480-26,000; Chainsaw Man vol.1 ¥7,000-18,000. The odd one is Berserk vol.1 (Hakusensha, 1990): one listing at ¥400,000 and nothing cheap at all.

Three things to check before paying a first-print premium: the cover price (Dragon Ball vol.1 first print says ¥360, a ¥484 price is a reprint), the ISBN format (old Jump Comics firsts carry the 4-digit ISBN4-08- code, not 978), and whether the obi text matches the first-print obi rather than a later "anime now airing" band that a seller moved over. Also, "Dragon Ball Z manga first edition" does not exist in Japan - the Japanese books are just Dragon Ball vols.1-42; the DBZ-branded vol.1 is the Viz English edition.

The full table with all thirteen volumes, the colophon checklist and the Japanese search terms (初版 / 帯付き / 全巻初版 / 復刻版 = facsimile reprint, avoid) is here: The most expensive manga: rare first editions and what they list for in Japan. For the reading-copy end of the same shops (Suruga-ya, BOOKOFF, Mercari), the ¥500 tankobon guide is linked from the same page: colophon checklist and shop table.

One Piece Card Game OP-17: the same sealed box is 12,500 yen on one Japanese site and 19,380 on anot

Not a hype post - the opposite. OP-17 世界最強の戦士 (The World's Strongest Warriors) came out in Japan on 22 August 2026, it is the seventeenth main booster and the set Bandai built around the card game's fourth anniversary, and two and a half weeks in it has turned into a really clean demonstration of something I keep trying to explain to people who buy Japanese TCG product from overseas storefronts.

Start from the list price, because it is public and fixed.

240 yen per pack, tax included. Six cards a pack, 24 packs a box. That is a 5,760 yen box at list, and this set is where the Japanese pack price stepped up from 220 yen. Every number below is worth reading as a multiple of 5,760 - that is the only honest way to tell a deal from a mark-up.

The gap.

I pulled these live on 7 September 2026:

- Sealed box, Japanese flea-market seller: 12,500 yen (US$86.25). Another one alongside it at 12,555 yen (US$86.63).
- Sealed box, Japanese online shop channel: 19,380 yen (US$133.72). The one next to it, 19,800 yen (US$136.62).

Same set, same shrink wrap, same 24 packs. About 55% more for the shop channel. This is not a condition difference or a variant, it is a channel difference: people who got allocation at launch are clearing stock at a profit they are happy with, while shop listings are still anchored to launch-window scarcity. The reason it matters to anyone reading this in English is that most overseas storefronts source from the second channel and then add their own margin on top, so you are paying the gap twice without ever seeing it.

If you actually want to open packs, buy loose.

A ten-pack lot was 2,700 yen (US$18.63) - that is 270 yen a pack against a 240 yen list price. Sealed boxes carry a premium for being sealed; loose packs out of an opened box barely carry one, and if what you want is the experience of opening something, the box does not make the pull rate any better.

If you want specific cards, buy the cards.

A playset (4 copies) of the Luffy super rare OP17-093 was 2,150 yen (US$14.84). Singles pricing on the Japanese market is brutal and efficient. A box costs five times that and guarantees you nothing. Every time I have run this comparison on a Japanese set, singles have won for anyone with a specific want list, and boxes have only won for people who genuinely enjoy the gamble - which is a fine reason to buy one, just not an economic one.

The one thing that is genuinely cheap here.

Sealed TCG boxes are small and light. A 700 g sealed box quoted about US$20.99 to the United States and US$14.91 to Singapore. That is unusual - for most of what I import the freight is the argument-ender, and here it is a rounding error against the price difference between the two Japanese listings above. Which means, for once, the sourcing decision really is just "which Japanese listing did you buy from".

Flea-market listings are single items, so anything specific I have quoted may well be gone by the time you read this - the band is what matters, not the individual listing.

Written up properly with the release details and the shipping numbers here, and this is the search I use to watch the two channels move against each other. Usual disclosure: that is the proxy service I buy through, so treat it as a price reference rather than a neutral one.

Anyone here been buying OP-17 singles? Curious whether the Elbaph cards have settled yet or whether it is still too early.

Ultraman at 60: the heroes are everywhere, the kaiju never left Japan - and the words that decide th

Sixtieth anniversary year, so I finally went down the Ultraman hole properly instead of buying one figure at a time. Posting what I worked out, because the shape of this market is different from anything else I collect.

The anniversary, briefly

The first episode aired on 10 July 1966 - that date is now registered as Ultraman Day - and Tsuburaya launched a 60th-anniversary project on 10 July 2025 that runs about two and a half years under the message "With U". The anniversary series, Ultraman Teo, started on Saturday 4 July 2026, 09:00 JST on the TV Tokyo network, with simultaneous overseas streaming. It took the slot over from Ultraman Omega, which ran July 2025 to January 2026.

The counter-intuitive bit: an anniversary is not a discount event. It pushes second-hand prices up on the old moulds, because every Japanese collector is topping up at the same time. What it does give you is supply - people sell old shelves to fund the new stuff, so things that were simply never listed start appearing.

Heroes vs kaiju is the whole story

Ask someone who does not watch the show to name a character and you get Ultraman. Ask a fan and you get Gomora, Eleking, Baltan. Overseas retail stocks the first kind, because the hero is the one on the poster. Japan stocks both, and the second kind is where the actual collecting happens.

So the single most useful thing I can tell you is: search ウルトラ怪獣 (Ultra Kaiju), not "Ultraman". Searching in English returns export-facing listings at export-facing prices; searching the monsters in Japanese returns the domestic market.

What the domestic prices look like

These were live listings when the guide I am working from was put together in late August, so treat them as the shape of the market rather than today's quote:

- Ultraman Omega Sound & Action figure, new - 1,280 yen
- Magma Seijin, discontinued 800-size sofubi - 1,280 yen
- Ultraseven, Yoshinoya campaign prize - 1,650 yen
- Ultraman 80, unopened out-of-print sofubi - 1,980 yen
- Ultra Action Figure, the original Ultraman - 2,000 yen
- Gomora, Ultra Kaiju Series 2005 - 2,555 yen
- Gamakujira, Ultra Kaiju Series sofubi - 2,850 yen
- Ultraman Orb Origin the First sofubi - 2,999 yen
- CCP Ultimate Ultraman 1/6, red Specium ver., LED light-up - 13,640 yen

Current Bandai sofubi retail for about 990 yen including tax in Japan, and the hero line is past its 127th numbered figure. Note that a 1966 design and a 2016 design cost roughly the same - recognition sets the price here, not age.

The vocabulary that moves the number

Two words are most of the difference between a 1,500 yen figure and a 5,000 yen figure that looks identical in the photo:

- 生産終了 / 廃盤 - production ended, mould retired. Bandai rotates the kaiju line constantly and does not re-run most of it, so the supply is whatever was already sold. This is the word to hunt.
- 未開封 - unopened, still sealed. Sofubi paint rubs and joints loosen, so sealed examples of retired moulds behave like sealed games: the premium is for the seal.

Also worth knowing:
- ソフビ - soft vinyl. The core format: hollow, painted, hand-sized.
- 800サイズ - the old 800-yen price-point format. Tells you roughly the size and which generation of the line it is.
- 非売品 - not for sale. A prize or campaign item that never had a retail price. The Ultraseven above came out of a Yoshinoya beef-bowl campaign; you got it by eating at the restaurant during a specific window, so resale is the only market that ever existed for it.
- 初期版 - early version / first production run. Later runs differ in paint and mould detail.

Shipping, which is where people lose the savings

Sofubi is hollow, so it is all volume and no mass - exactly the case where carriers bill you on volumetric size rather than scale weight. The marginal cost of the fifth figure in a box is close to nothing while the first one carries the whole postage, which is why buying Ultraman one figure at a time looks absurd and a box of eight looks like a bargain. Work out the whole want-list first, then order once.

US buyers: the $800 de minimis exemption was revoked with effect from 29 August 2025, so a consolidated box is assessable regardless of value now. That does not change the maths above - it reinforces it. One box, not four.

Full write-up with the price tables, the term-by-term listing glossary and the customs detail: Ultraman merch from Japan 2026: the 60th anniversary, kaiju sofubi and what it costs to get them home

And this is the search I keep open for the monster half of the line: Ultra Kaiju sofubi listed in Japan right now - usual disclosure, that is the forwarding service I buy through, so read it as a price reference rather than a recommendation.

Question for anyone deeper in this than me: is there a decent reference for which kaiju moulds have been re-run and which genuinely have not? I keep finding out the hard way, after paying a retired-mould premium for something Bandai quietly reissued.

Takara Tomy Masterpiece and the Japan-only Transformers: what stays in Japan, where it actually live

Transformers is one of those franchises where the Japanese release and the Western release are genuinely different objects, and if you collect it seriously that difference eventually costs you money. Hasbro owns the brand in the West, Takara Tomy makes it in Japan, and the two sides regularly ship different versions of the same character: extra paint applications, die-cast parts, redesigned accessories, cartoon-accurate colours. A lot of collectors end up deciding the Takara Tomy release is the definitive one, and then discover it was never going to reach their local shelf.

These are notes on what actually stays in Japan and where each category really lives, written from the buying side rather than the reviewing side.

What tends not to leave Japan

The Masterpiece (MP) line is the flagship: highly articulated, screen-accurate figures aimed at adult collectors rather than kids. The G1-style mainline (Optimus Prime, Megatron, the Autobot cars — Jazz, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker) gets new tooling and reissues regularly. Around that sit the things that are much harder to get: the MPG Trainbots that combine into Raiden, anniversary and event colourways from things like the Tokyo Toy Show, Lucky Draw variants made in tiny numbers, the Beast Wars Masterpiece figures (Cheetor, Dinobot, Optimus Primal), and Generations Selects releases with Japan-specific SKUs that differ from the Hasbro version.

Allocations are small and resellers move fast, so most of these figures live on the secondary market within a week of launch rather than on a retail page.

Where each category actually lives, and what it costs

Amazon Japan is the easiest source for current Masterpiece stock and recent reissues — new and sealed, roughly 12,000 to 30,000 yen for a standard MP car or character, more for large or combiner figures. Worth checking first if box condition matters to you.

Yahoo! Auctions Japan is the deep well for out-of-print MP, vintage G1 and event exclusives. Auctions can open low, but rare Lucky Draw variants routinely climb past 50,000 yen. This is where the genuinely unavailable things surface.

Mercari Japan is peer-to-peer — individual collectors clearing shelves. Loose-complete MP figures and discounted recent releases, often 8,000 to 20,000 yen. Listings are fixed-price, so a good one is gone in minutes rather than days.

Suruga-ya is a used-hobby dealer with proper condition grading, and it is the best value for older Masterpiece and Beast Wars MP at dealer-set prices instead of auction-fever prices.

The part that stops most people

None of those four will ship to you directly. They want a Japanese address, a Japanese phone number and a Japanese payment method. That is the gap proxy services fill: they buy on your behalf, receive the item, and forward it on. If you are hunting auctions rather than buying one sealed box, two things matter more than the per-item fee — a free storage window, so several wins can pool into one parcel instead of paying international postage four separate times, and how the consolidation itself is priced.

One thing that changed, and catches importers out

The United States withdrew its US$800 de minimis exemption on 29 August 2025. A US-bound parcel is now assessable regardless of declared value, so the old assumption that anything under $800 sails through is dead. Budget duty into the total before you bid on a high-end MP, and check current customs guidance for your own country — the EU is separately running a temporary flat fee on low-value imports.

Full version of this, with the marketplace comparison table and the customs section, is on the site I write for: buying Transformers and other Japan-exclusive figures from Japan. Disclosure, since it belongs up front rather than buried: that is OneMall, a Japanese proxy-buying service, and the main site is theirs too. The marketplace notes above hold whether or not you use them.