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.

Pokemon Center Online will not ship to you: the lottery, the domestic-only clause, and what actually

Every few months someone in an anime-merch thread hits the same wall: they find a Pokemon Center plush that only ever existed in Japan, open the Japanese store, fill the cart, and then discover there is no checkout for them. It is worth being precise about why, because the reason changes what you should do next.

It is a delivery-address problem, not a stock problem

Pokemon Center Online (ポケモンセンターオンライン) spells it out in its own terms of service: delivery of products under the service is limited to within Japan (Article 19, clause 4). There is no overseas option at any price, and no amount of patience makes one appear. The international Pokemon Center site is a separate operation with a separate catalogue — it is not the Japanese store with different shipping.

The lottery is the part people underestimate

The Japanese store's own service list includes applying to the lottery for lottery-sale products (抽選販売). That matters more than the shipping clause, because a lottery removes the one advantage a determined shopper normally has. Refreshing at the release minute does nothing; you apply, and you either win the right to buy or you do not. Article 27 also prohibits reselling for profit and registering more than one account per person, so allocation is deliberately one-per-person. Buying one plush for yourself through a forwarding address is an ordinary personal purchase. Building a bulk-buy operation on top of those clauses is the exact thing they exist to stop, and I would not pretend otherwise.

Which lines are actually the hard ones

Pokemon fit — the small seated plush, released in Pokedex order. The appeal is completeness: obscure Pokemon that no mass-market line would touch get a fit release.
Pokemon Dolls and the mocchiri (もっちり) plush — the squashier silhouettes, released in waves rather than kept in stock.
Campaign and collaboration goods — Pokemon Sleep, seasonal fairs, single-store openings. These run for weeks, not years.

The lines rotate. A fit release on the shelf last spring is frequently not orderable this summer, and no restock is promised. That churn, not scalping, is the first reason overseas collectors end up on Japan's domestic second-hand market, where the retired lines actually live.

Searching so you find the stock

Search in Japanese and search the line, not the English name. ポケモンセンター brings back the whole channel; ポケモンfit narrows to the one line. Then add the Pokemon's Japanese name — Rayquaza is レックウザ, Eevee is イーブイ, Dewgong is ジュゴン. English keywords return a small fraction of what is listed.

Then read the Japanese condition wording instead of the photos, because plush hides wear badly in pictures and honestly in text: タグ付き means the hang tag is still attached (the plush equivalent of a sealed box), 未使用 is unused, 目立った傷や汚れなし is no noticeable marks, 使用感あり is visible wear.

Shipping plush is a volume problem

Plush is light and bulky, so international shipping is charged on volumetric weight rather than actual weight. One plush in its own box is the worst value in Japanese proxy shopping; four in one box is among the best. If you are using a proxy that holds purchases (OneMall's window is 90 days), let a want-list fill up before you pay to ship anything.

Fees, without the sales pitch

Service fees are worth checking per source, because they are not one number. Through OneMall: Mercari and Mercari Shops are a flat 300 yen per order; Yahoo! Auctions is 3% of the winning bid with a 200 yen minimum and a 300 yen cap; any other Japanese shop, including Pokemon Center Online itself via their LinkBuy flow, is 5% with a 200 yen minimum and a 1,000 yen cap. For comparison, as of 2026 Buyee charges 500 yen per order, ZenMarket 500 yen per item (800 on Mercari), and Neokyo 350 yen per item. Nobody does this for free, and international shipping is separate from all of it.

The write-up I pulled the terms citations from is here, with the clause numbers and a fuller fee table: Pokemon Center Online Japan 2026: why it ships domestic-only. If you just want to see what is currently listed domestically, the Japanese-keyword search is ポケモンセンター ぬいぐるみ — second-hand listings turn over constantly, so treat any price you see as today's price only.

How to actually complete a gashapon set when you do not live in Japan (2026)

Every time I post a shelf photo, someone asks the same question: how do you get a full gashapon set when you do not live in Japan and the machines only take coins? Here is the honest version, including the part most guides skip.

The machine is the problem, not the price

A gashapon series is normally four to six variants loaded into one machine as mixed capsules. You pay per turn, you get one at random, and you cannot pick. Bandai's own release calendar for August 2026 runs new series at 300, 400 and 500 yen a turn depending on the line, so the face value of a five-figure set is around 2,000 yen. Nobody completes a set for 2,000 yen. Random draws mean duplicates, and the duplicates are the business model.

Three things follow from that, and together they are why importing capsule toys is its own skill:

1. The machines are physical and cash-fed. No account, no cart, no shipping address. They sit in arcades, department stores and station concourses in Japan.

2. Series retire fast. New waves land weekly and floor space is finite. A series from three months ago is generally not on any machine anywhere, at any price.

3. Completing costs more than the set is worth. Which is fine if you enjoy the ritual, and a terrible deal if you just want the figures.

The scale is genuinely absurd, by the way - Bandai Namco's GASHAPON Department Store flagship in Ikebukuro bills itself as the world's largest capsule-toy store with over 4,000 machine slots. That is what you are trying to reach through a screen.

The route almost nobody mentions: buy the finished set

Japanese collectors complete sets and then sell them on the domestic second-hand market, usually because they only wanted one figure. Those listings are the single best route for an overseas collector: no duplicates, no variance, and retired series are still there years later. Typical pricing I see right now is in the few-hundred-yen-per-figure range for common lines, which is at or below what a fresh capsule costs per turn - for a series you can no longer buy fresh at all.

Search terms that actually work

This is where most people give up too early, because searching in English on a Japanese marketplace returns nothing useful.

- Category words: ガシャポン, ガチャ, or the generic カプセルトイ. "Gachapon" in Latin letters finds almost nothing.
- Completeness: コンプ / コンプリート means the full set. 全5種 states the variant count. Without one of these you drown in single figures.
- シークレット is the hidden bonus variant some series include. Check it separately - a listing that says "complete" often means the standard variants only, and if the secret is included the seller will say so.
- 未開封 is unopened, capsule and paper insert intact, which collectors pay a bit more for. 開封済 is opened and usually assembled - for display that is fine and cheaper.

Getting it out of Japan

Domestic sellers mostly will not ship abroad and often will not take a foreign card, so you need a proxy or forwarding service: they buy at a Japanese address, receive the parcel, and re-ship it. Two practical notes specific to capsule toys.

First, these figures are tiny and light, so a single set is nearly all overhead. Buy several sets and ship them together - five sets in one box costs barely more than one. A storage window matters for the same reason; the service I use holds purchases for 90 days, which is long enough to keep hunting the last series you want before paying for freight once.

Second, watch the fee floor rather than the percentage. On a 1,900 yen set, a percentage-based commission rounds to nothing and the flat component is the whole cost. I checked live item pages this week and the Mercari-side service fee came back as a flat 300 yen per item on a 1,220 yen listing and on a 23,000 yen listing alike, which tells you where the maths tips: cheap sets should be batched, expensive single items are proportionally cheap to import.

Also, customs is your bill, not the seller's, and it is charged in your country on declared value plus shipping. For capsule toys the amounts are usually small, but the US removed the low-value de minimis exemption in 2025, so it is no longer automatically zero.

If you want the ritual anyway

Bandai sells a home capsule machine, the Gashapon Machine Try, at 9,350 yen on its own online shop. It is a novelty, not a saving, but it is a real way to get the crank-and-clunk without a flight to Ikebukuro.

I wrote the long version of all this, with the complete-set arithmetic and live examples, here: Gashapon 2026: how to buy complete capsule-toy sets from Japan. The proxy I use for the second-hand side is OneMall - disclosure, I write for them, so treat that as a source rather than a recommendation you have to take.

What I still have not solved: series with a secret variant where the seller genuinely does not know whether they pulled it. If anyone has a reliable tell from the listing photos, I am listening.

Takara Tomy vs Hasbro: how to actually buy Japan-exclusive Transformers from overseas (2026)

If you collect Transformers, sooner or later you hit the same wall: the version you actually want was only released in Japan. Here is how that split works in 2026, and what it really takes to get a Takara Tomy box shipped to your door.

Why the Japanese release is usually the one collectors chase

Transformers is co-owned by Hasbro in the West and Takara Tomy in Japan, and the two companies routinely ship different versions of the same character. The Japanese editions tend to add paint applications, die-cast parts, redesigned accessories and exclusive colour schemes. The flagship is the Masterpiece (MP) line: highly articulated, screen-accurate figures aimed at adult collectors rather than kids. Anniversary reissues, event pieces and Lucky Draw variants often never leave Japan at all, which is why they end up on the secondary market at multiples of retail.

Where the stock actually is

Four sources cover almost everything, and they behave very differently:

1. Amazon Japan - the calmest option for current, sealed MP releases and recent reissues. Prices are stable, listings are in stock or they are not, and there is no bidding drama. It is also the source most likely to refuse an overseas card or address, which is where a proxy comes in.

2. Yahoo! Auctions Japan - the deep end. Event exclusives, Lucky Draw figures, boxed vintage G1 and anything genuinely rare surfaces here first. Auctions run on Japan time, so the closing minutes almost always land while you are asleep. Snipe support matters more than the headline price.

3. Mercari Japan - individual sellers clearing shelves. Best value per yen for loose or opened figures, worst for condition consistency. Read the Japanese condition wording rather than the photos: "未開封" is unopened, "開封済み" means the box has been opened, "美品" is a subjective "beautiful condition" claim, not a grade.

4. Suruga-ya - a used-media chain with a genuinely huge back catalogue and conservative grading. Slow to ship, but the descriptions are usually honest about box damage.

The part people underestimate: getting it out of Japan

Most of these sellers will not ship internationally, and several will not accept a non-Japanese payment method at all. The standard workaround is a proxy or forwarding service: they buy on your behalf using a domestic address and card, receive the parcel, and then re-ship it to you. Three things are worth checking before you commit to any of them:

- Fees are layered, not single. Expect a per-order service fee, domestic shipping to the warehouse, then international shipping. Compare the total landed cost, not the service fee alone - the international leg is usually the biggest line for a boxed MP figure.
- Consolidation and storage windows. If you are hunting several auctions over a few weeks, free storage time and the ability to combine parcels into one shipment matter more than a slightly cheaper commission.
- Inspection before shipping. For anything sold as "unopened", a service that photographs the parcel on arrival gives you a chance to reject a crushed box before it crosses an ocean.

Customs, briefly

Import duty and tax are charged in your own country, on the declared value plus shipping, and they are your bill, not the seller's. In the US the de minimis exemption that used to let low-value parcels through duty-free was revoked in 2025, so budget for it rather than being surprised by a courier's handling invoice. High-end MP figures are exactly the price bracket where this bites.

Practical order of operations

Check Amazon Japan first for anything current. If it is sold out, search Suruga-ya and Mercari for a used copy before you touch auctions. Save Yahoo! Auctions for the pieces that genuinely only exist there, and set your maximum bid based on the landed cost including shipping and duty, not the hammer price.

I keep a longer write-up of the Masterpiece line and the Japan-exclusive figures worth hunting here: Transformers from Japan 2026: Masterpiece, Japan-exclusive figures and how to buy, and the proxy service I use for the Yahoo! Auctions side is OneMall - disclosure, I write for them, so treat that link as a source and not a recommendation you have to take.

If anyone has a better route for Lucky Draw pieces than waiting on auction alerts, I would genuinely like to hear it.