Ichiban Kuji explained: how Bandai's prize lottery works, and how to get the prizes outside Japan

If you follow figure collectors on social media you have definitely seen it: somebody holds a boxed figure over their head in a Lawson and yells "A PRIZE!" That is Ichiban Kuji, and after answering the same questions about it three times this month I figured I would write the whole thing down in one place.

What it actually is

Ichiban Kuji (一番くじ) is a prize lottery run by Bandai Spirits. "Ichiban" means number one / the best, "kuji" means lottery, so the name literally reads "the number-one lottery." The important part, and the part people outside Japan usually get wrong, is that there are no losing tickets. You are not pulling for a chance at a prize the way you do with a gacha capsule. You pay for a slip, you open it, and it tells you which prize tier you just won. You walk out with a physical item every single time.

A ticket normally runs about ¥700–¥1,000. Sets are sold in convenience stores (7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart), anime shops, hobby shops, bookstores and arcades, in a limited print run. When the box is empty, that set is finished forever — there is no restock. That scarcity is most of the reason the good prizes hold value.

How the tiers work

Prizes are lettered from A downward, usually to G or H depending on the campaign.

A prize — the headline item. Almost always the big scale figure everybody actually wants.
B / C — secondary figures, sometimes a chibi or a second character.
D through H — the everyday stuff: acrylic stands, mugs, hand towels, rubber straps, clear files, mini plates.

Then two things that trip people up:

Last One prize — whoever draws the final ticket in the box also gets an extra exclusive figure, usually a recolor or alternate version of the A prize. This is why you sometimes see people buy out the last ten tickets in a shop.

Double Chance — you keep your used ticket stub and enter it in a draw for another exclusive that was never in the box at all.

Because the lower tiers are genuinely nice licensed goods rather than junk, a set of 70-80 tickets tends to get cleared out fast when the series is popular. Demon Slayer, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen and Evangelion sets in particular tend to vanish in a day or two in central Tokyo.

Why you cannot just order one

This is the frustrating bit. Bandai Spirits sells Ichiban Kuji as an in-person retail product in Japan. There is no official overseas ordering, no international shipping, and the Japanese online shops that do carry prize figures (Mercari Japan, Rakuma, Suruga-ya, most Yahoo! Auctions sellers) will not ship outside Japan either. Domestic-only checkout is the default in Japan, not the exception.

So there are basically three routes, and one of them is a trap.

1. Buy the ticket itself through a proxy. Some proxy services will buy physical tickets, but you are gambling on the tier and paying the full ticket price per pull, plus fees, plus shipping on whatever you happen to win. Fun if you want the experience. Expensive if you want a specific figure.

2. Buy the exact prize on the Japanese secondary market. This is what I do now. The A prize and Last One from any given campaign show up on Mercari Japan and Suruga-ya within days of release, often at a very reasonable price because a lot of Japanese buyers only wanted the campaign's smaller goods and are dumping the figure. You are buying the item you actually want at a known price rather than rolling dice. Because those sites are domestic-only, you route the order through a Japan proxy buying service — it gives you a Japanese address, buys and receives the item, then forwards it to you. I use OneMall for this; searching 一番くじ across the Japanese marketplaces pulls up the current campaigns and the leftovers from old ones in the same list, which is easier than checking four sites separately.

3. Buy it from a western reseller. Don't, unless you have checked route 2 first. The same A prize on eBay is routinely 2-4x the Japanese secondary price, and that is before you notice half the listings are for the small D-tier goods with the campaign's promotional art as the thumbnail.

Practical things I wish I had known

Search in Japanese. 一番くじ plus the series name in katakana will return several times more listings than the romaji spelling. If you cannot type it, copy-paste it.

The box matters for resale but not for shipping cost, which is volumetric — a 1/7-ish prize figure in its original box is a genuinely large parcel. Budget for it. Consolidating a few items into one shipment is much cheaper than sending three separate boxes.

Prize figures are not scale-figure quality. That is not a criticism, it is just the category — they are cast at a lower price point than a ¥20,000 Good Smile release, so expect softer paint apps. Judge them against the ¥700 ticket, not against a ¥25,000 scale figure.

Old campaigns are cheap. Everyone chases the current set. A campaign from two years ago for a series you like is often sitting on Suruga-ya at a fraction of release price, in box, untouched.

Check whether the figure was a Last One before you buy. Last One versions look almost identical to the A prize in photos but are worth noticeably more, and some sellers do not know the difference in either direction.

I wrote up the longer version of all this — the tier structure, price ranges, and a step-by-step for the proxy route — over here: Ichiban Kuji 2026: meaning, how the lottery works, and the cheapest way to buy from Japan.

If anyone here has pulled an A prize in person, I want to hear which campaign — I have never actually been in the country when a set I cared about was running.