Jujutsu Kaisen goods from Japan: reading Culling Game listings

The Culling Game arc finished its Japanese broadcast months before most overseas fans started watching it. Season 3 ran for 12 episodes from 9 January to 27 March 2026 on MBS/TBS, and the goods tied to it were made for the Japanese domestic market that spring. Many of them now circulate only on Japanese second-hand marketplaces, so the useful skill for an overseas fan is reading those listings.

Three kinds of goods that rarely leave Japan

• Ichiban Kuji prizes. BANDAI SPIRITS sells the lottery at convenience stores, bookshops and hobby shops in Japan. Every ticket wins something, from a figure to a towel, but there is no international channel, so prizes outside Japan almost always come out of a Japanese resale listing.
• Prize-line (景品) figures. SEGA, Taito, FuRyu and Banpresto make crane-game and lottery figures that are not sold at retail. Lines such as Luminasta, FIGURIZMα, MAXIMATIC and Noodle Stopper show up constantly in Japanese listings and rarely in Western shops.
• Event and store exclusives. Jump Shop items, cinema bonus goods from the 2025 Execution compilation film and pop-up-shop acrylic stands are small runs made for one venue.

Search terms that actually work

• Search 呪術廻戦 rather than "Jujutsu Kaisen". Japanese sellers title listings in Japanese, and the English query returns a fraction of them.
• Narrow with フィギュア (figure), 一番くじ (Ichiban Kuji) or アクリルスタンド (acrylic stand).
• Character names: 五条悟 (Gojo Satoru), 虎杖悠仁 (Itadori Yuji), 伏黒恵 (Fushiguro Megumi), 釘崎野薔薇 (Kugisaki Nobara), 両面宿儺 (Ryomen Sukuna).
• Add 死滅回游 (Culling Game) to separate the new arc from the much larger pile of Shibuya-arc and earlier goods.

A short glossary for the listing text

• A賞 / B賞 / ラストワン賞: kuji prize tier. Check that the tier in the title matches the figure in the photo.
• 景品 / プライズ: prize item. Made for crane games, never sold in shops.
• 未開封 / 開封品 / 中古: unopened / opened / used.
• 箱傷み: box damage. Prize boxes are thin, so this is common and usually means exactly what it says.
• 内袋未開封: opened box, inner bag still sealed.
• 非売品: not for sale. A campaign or event item with no retail equivalent.

One check before you pay

Prize figures always name a maker in the listing: SEGA, Taito, FuRyu, Banpresto or BANDAI SPIRITS. A "figure" with no maker named anywhere in the title, description or box photo deserves a closer look at the photos before you commit, and if you buy through a forwarder, ask for unboxing photos before it ships internationally.

Shipping

Figure boxes are light but bulky. Carriers bill on actual or volumetric weight, whichever is higher, so an empty-looking box can cost more than its weight suggests, and combining an acrylic stand or two with a figure in one parcel usually makes sense. For US buyers: the $800 de minimis exemption no longer applies, so since 29 August 2025 parcels of any value go through customs and pay applicable duties, taxes and fees.

Disclosure: this post comes from the OneMall team. OneMall is a Japan proxy-shopping and forwarding service, so the link below is commercial. It points to our longer guide to buying Jujutsu Kaisen merch from Japan, which has example listings, a route comparison and source links for the dates above. OneMall does not independently authenticate listings or guarantee product condition.

Which do you collect: kuji prizes, prize-line figures or the small acrylic and can-badge goods?

Bandai, Banpresto, FuRyu or Sega? Reading the label on a Japanese prize figure

Japanese resale listings are much easier to read once you stop treating every logo as a promise of quality and start treating it as a clue about how the item was originally sold.

Bandai and BANDAI SPIRITS are not quite the same signal

Bandai covers an enormous range of character toys: Tamagotchi, Carddass, candy toys, children's transformation items and plenty of mass-market merchandise. BANDAI SPIRITS is the name collectors see more often on hobby products such as Gunpla, Ichiban Kuji prizes and higher-end figures.

That distinction helps when a seller uses only a franchise name in the title. A BANDAI SPIRITS logo can point toward a hobby or lottery release, while an ordinary Bandai mark may belong to anything from a small candy-toy figure to a large electronic toy. The logo identifies the company family, not the exact product line, so the box label and item code still matter.

Banpresto usually means prize distribution

Banpresto is one of the names most often seen on crane-game figures. Lines such as Q posket, DXF and many character-specific series were made for amusement prizes rather than the normal hobby-store shelf.

That explains two things that can otherwise look suspicious. First, there may be no conventional retail price printed on the box. Second, the same character can appear in several nearly identical colour versions or releases. The useful identifiers are the full line name, release month and box art—not a seller's phrase such as “Japan limited.”

Prize figures are designed to reach a broad audience, so they tend to use simpler paint applications and fewer separate parts than scale figures. That does not make them bad; it means a ¥1,500 used Banpresto figure should not be compared with a ¥20,000 scale as if both products had the same brief.

FuRyu and Sega Fave occupy similar territory, with different line names

FuRyu's Noodle Stopper and Trio-Try-iT figures are common in Japanese secondhand shops. The Noodle Stopper pose is designed to sit on an edge, while Trio-Try-iT usually aims for a larger display presence at prize-figure cost. Sega Fave, the toy arm of Sega, supplies another large share of arcade prize figures and plush.

When comparing listings, search by the maker plus the line name. Searching only the character can mix scale figures, lottery prizes, crane prizes and unlicensed items into one result page. For plush, add the approximate height in centimetres because sellers often omit the formal series name.

Ichiban Kuji is a sales format, not a manufacturer

An Ichiban Kuji item comes from a shop-counter lottery run by BANDAI SPIRITS. Letters such as A, B and C identify prize tiers within that particular lottery. They do not create a universal quality ladder across every series. An A-prize figure from one lottery and a B-prize plush from another cannot be compared by letter alone.

The last-prize version is awarded with the final ticket and often uses a different colour or finish. On resale sites, sellers sometimes shorten this to “Last One.” Check the exact Japanese lottery title and prize label on the box before paying a premium for the variant.

Three listing checks are more useful than the word “rare”

1. Match the maker, product line and item code across the title, box and base markings shown in the photographs.
2. Check whether the item was a retail release, crane prize, capsule toy or lottery prize. That original channel explains the packaging and normal price range.
3. For an opened item, look for photos of the face paint, support pegs, base and small accessories. A complete box photo alone does not show those condition points.

I adapted this brand map from the OneMall team's longer guide to Japanese toy makers and product categories. Disclosure: I work with OneMall, a Japan proxy-shopping service, so that link is a commercial source rather than independent collecting advice. OneMall does not independently authenticate listings or guarantee item condition.

For collectors who buy prize figures, which identifier has saved you from ordering the wrong version most often: maker, line name, release month or box code?

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.