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.

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.

The Culling Game merch gap: why the Netflix drop did not bring the goods with it (2026)

Field notes from a month of watching the Culling Game merch situation, written up because I keep seeing the same question in comments.

Netflix put Culling Game Part 1 in front of everyone on 23 July. The problem is that Japan finished watching it on 27 March. Twelve episodes, January to March on MBS/TBS, and the merchandise cycle ran alongside the broadcast — which means it came and went four months before most of the world started caring. That is why the English-language stores you check are still full of Shibuya-arc stock from two years ago.

Three things I found while digging through Japanese listings:

1. Ichiban Kuji is the real gap, and it is structural, not a supply issue. The official BANDAI SPIRITS site says outright that kuji are sold at convenience stores, bookshops and hobby shops across Japan. There is no export channel and there never was. Every kuji prize you see on eBay came out of a Japanese resale listing first, with somebody's proxy fee and margin already stacked on top. Two more Jujutsu Kaisen kuji are listed for September, so this is about to happen again.

2. Prize-line figures are absurdly good value and almost invisible abroad. SEGA Luminasta, Taito FIGURIZM-alpha, MAXIMATIC, Noodle Stopper — these are crane-game and lottery prizes, not retail products, so they are not in anyone's export catalogue. Japanese resale has them at 2,000-3,000 yen. A B-prize Gojo from the movie kuji is about 2,000 yen right now. The sculpts at that price are genuinely better than they have any right to be.

3. Part 2 is confirmed but has no date. It was announced straight after the finale and there is still no broadcast window. Practically that means Part 1 goods are sitting in the quiet trough — the Japanese hype has passed and the next wave has not started. If you were ever going to buy this arc's stuff, the window is open now and it will close the moment a date is announced.

One thing I got wrong early on and want to save someone else from: search in Japanese. Typing "Jujutsu Kaisen" into a Japanese marketplace returns a fraction of the inventory, because sellers write 呪術廻戦. Add フィギュア for figures, 一番くじ for kuji prizes, アクリルスタンド for acrylic stands. My hit rate roughly quadrupled once I stopped searching in English.

I wrote the long version up with the actual live prices and the fee maths here: Jujutsu Kaisen merch from Japan (2026) — it covers which categories are Japan-only, what a kuji prize actually costs versus what importers charge, and the shipping side.

For anyone who has not used a proxy before, the short version is that you buy on the Japanese marketplace through a service that has a Japanese address, then consolidate before shipping. I use OneMall; there are others. The bit that actually saves money is consolidation, not the service fee — figure boxes are bulky and carriers bill on volumetric weight, so shipping five items separately is where the money disappears.

Happy to answer questions if anyone is trying to track down something specific from Part 1.

Suruga-ya is not empty, you are searching it in English: four measured comparisons (2026)

Every time Suruga-ya (駿河屋) comes up in a merch thread, someone reports back that they looked and it was mostly empty. It is not empty. The catalogue is indexed by Japanese product titles, and the English word you typed is not one of them. I ran the same four searches both ways this morning (2026-08-19) so the gap is a number instead of an opinion.

The same store, two languages, measured today

"Demon Slayer figure" — 0 results (the search URL 404s outright). 鬼滅の刃 フィギュア — 3,060.
"Nendoroid" — 3 results. ねんどろいど — 7,267.
"Sailor Moon" — 195 results. セーラームーン — 11,451.
"Evangelion" — 1,395 results. エヴァンゲリオン — 13,673.

Evangelion is the interesting one: 1,395 hits in English looks like a real catalogue, so you would never guess you are seeing a tenth of it. The English hits you do get are mostly items whose official title is written in romaji on the box. Everything else — the trading figures, the prize figures, the doujinshi, the out-of-print scale figures people actually want — is filed under kana and kanji.

There is no English mode to switch to

I checked before writing this: suruga-ya.jp has no language toggle on the front page, and /en is a 404. Whatever browser translation you run, the search box is still matching Japanese strings, which is why translating the page does not fix the result count. Get the Japanese title first, then paste it in. Three reliable sources for the title: the Japanese Wikipedia article for the series, MyFigureCollection's item page (it lists the JP name alongside the English one), and the manufacturer's own product page — Good Smile, Kotobukiya and Bandai all keep Japanese product pages up long after a figure is discontinued.

Read the two words in front of the title

Suruga-ya prefixes listings with 中古 (used) or 新品 (new), and on a search page for a popular line you will see far more 中古 than 新品 — that is the whole reason the prices are what they are. Used listings for the same figure are frequently a fraction of the new price, and the difference is usually box condition, not the figure. If a listing is cheap and you cannot tell why, the answer is normally in the Japanese condition line, not in the photo.

Then the boring part

Checkout is built for a Japanese address and Japanese payment, so overseas buyers generally go through a proxy or forwarding service that buys inside Japan and reships. Whoever you use, two habits matter more than which one you pick: search in Japanese (see above), and let purchases pool into one parcel instead of shipping each figure as it arrives, because international shipping is charged on volumetric weight and a single boxed figure is the worst value in this hobby.

On fees, so nobody has to guess: through OneMall, Mercari is a flat 300 yen per order, Yahoo! Auctions is 3% of the winning bid with a 200 yen minimum and 300 yen cap, and any other Japanese shop — Suruga-ya included — is 5% with a 200 yen minimum and a 1,000 yen cap. For comparison, Buyee is 500 yen per order, ZenMarket 500 yen per item, Neokyo 350 yen per item. International shipping is separate from all of those, everywhere.

The long English write-up of how ordering from Suruga-ya from abroad actually works is here: How to buy from Suruga-ya from abroad (2026). And if you want to see the Japanese-keyword effect for yourself without setting anything up, this is the same ねんどろいど search from the numbers above: ねんどろいど listings. Second-hand stock turns over daily, so hit counts and prices are today's, not permanent.