The same card, two prices, half a world apart.
The price trackers this hobby runs on all carry Japanese cards — and they price them off Western marketplaces, because Western sold data is the sold data they have. We record what those cards actually sell for in Japan, on Mercari and Yahoo! Japan, and set it against what the same card in the same grade actually sells for on eBay and in Europe. This page is that comparison, and it is the whole reason Hoshino exists.
Right now 60 cards clear the bar for that comparison — real recorded sales on both sides, inside one grade tier, close enough together in time to be a difference of place rather than of date. That number is small, and the rest of this page is an honest account of why.
Why 60, and not 1,132
The constraint is not the method — it is paired density. We hold a great deal of Japanese sold data and a great deal of Western sold data; what is rare is the same card, in the same grade, sold on both sides inside the same stretch of time. Each rung below is measured over the same 538,324 real recorded sales in the last 365 days. Only the bar changes.
Of 63,759 card-and-grade combinations with a real sale on at least one side, 59,779 had no Japanese side deep enough to use and 11,647 had no Western one. 71 had a side too widely spread to be a single price, 4 were further apart than one printing can be, and 60 compared prices from months apart. We publish those numbers because a count you cannot interrogate is a marketing figure.
We deliberately do not publish a single headline index — "the Japan–West gap is X%" — at this depth. A median taken over 60 cards would describe our coverage, not the market, and it would move several points every time one card paired up. When the paired count is in the hundreds, that number becomes publishable. It is not there yet.
How big the gaps are
Every qualifying pair on the board, bucketed by how far apart the two markets are before costs, against how many of them are still worth anything after. This is the shape of the whole board — including the rows that are locked below.
| Gap before costs | Pairs | Still positive after costs | Best net gap in band |
|---|---|---|---|
| under 10% | 11 | 0 | −$15.23 |
| 10–25% | 9 | 0 | −$15.74 |
| 25–50% | 22 | 0 | −$7.78 |
| 50–100% | 21 | 3 | $118 |
| 100%+ | 5 | 0 | −$5.16 |
48 of 68 pairs are cheaper in Japan; 20 are cheaper in the West. The median gap before costs is 39.3%. Only three of them are still positive once freight, import tax, currency conversion and the selling fee come out — $12–18 of shipping and a 10–20% tariff kill most gaps under 30% on their own, whatever the gross number looks like.
Worked end to end
Three of the board, in full: both medians, the depth and the venue behind each one, every recorded sale, and the arithmetic from the Japanese price to the money that is actually left. At least one of them deliberately does not work — a method you only ever see succeed is a sales pitch.
🇯🇵 Mercari Japan ×4
9 Sept 2026observed dates
🇺🇸 eBay (US) ×3
17 Jun 2026 – 9 Sept 2026
Show all 7 recorded sales behind these two medians
| Side | Date | Venue | Price | Proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 (observed) | 🇯🇵 Mercari Japan | $712 | listing → |
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 (observed) | 🇯🇵 Mercari Japan | $369 | listing → |
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 (observed) | 🇯🇵 Mercari Japan | $368 | listing → |
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 (observed) | 🇯🇵 Mercari Japan | $272 | listing → |
| US | 9 Sept 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $749 | listing → |
| US | 24 Jul 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $650 | listing → |
| US | 17 Jun 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $650 | listing → |
🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions ×7
18 Jun 2026 – 16 Sept 2026
🇺🇸 eBay (US) ×3
31 Aug 2026 – 8 Sept 2026
Show all 10 recorded sales behind these two medians
| Side | Date | Venue | Price | Proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 16 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $87.05 | listing → |
| Japan | 15 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $98.30 | listing → |
| Japan | 14 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $93.74 | listing → |
| Japan | 13 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $83.23 | listing → |
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $97.52 | listing → |
| Japan | 24 Aug 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $109 | listing → |
| Japan | 18 Jun 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $109 | listing → |
| US | 8 Sept 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $50.00 | listing → |
| US | 31 Aug 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $60.00 | listing → |
| US | 31 Aug 2026 | 🇺🇸 eBay (US) | $46.00 | listing → |
🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions ×15
4 Apr 2026 – 16 Sept 2026
🇬🇧 eBay UK ×2 · 🇪🇺 eBay (eurozone) ×1
6 Sept 2026 – 7 Sept 2026
Show all 18 recorded sales behind these two medians
| Side | Date | Venue | Price | Proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 16 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $9.67 | listing → |
| Japan | 16 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $9.67 | listing → |
| Japan | 16 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $9.80 | listing → |
| Japan | 16 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.38 | listing → |
| Japan | 9 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.06 | listing → |
| Japan | 8 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.03 | listing → |
| Japan | 7 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $7.97 | listing → |
| Japan | 5 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $9.46 | listing → |
| Japan | 3 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $10.59 | listing → |
| Japan | 3 Sept 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.42 | listing → |
| Japan | 29 Aug 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $7.77 | listing → |
| Japan | 29 Aug 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.10 | listing → |
| Japan | 25 Aug 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $8.10 | listing → |
| Japan | 19 May 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $14.27 | listing → |
| Japan | 4 Apr 2026 | 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Auctions | $6.40 | listing → |
| Europe | 7 Sept 2026 | 🇪🇺 eBay (eurozone) | $29.06 | listing → |
| Europe | 6 Sept 2026 | 🇬🇧 eBay UK | $18.96 | listing → |
| Europe | 6 Sept 2026 | 🇬🇧 eBay UK | $22.15 | listing → |
The board
The ranked list is the part that costs money: which cards, in which grade, in which direction, with every recorded sale on both sides and a link to each one.
65 more pairs — ranked, with the cards named
You have just seen the count, the distribution, and three of them worked from the Japanese sale to the money left over. The rest of the board is the same thing for every remaining pair.
- All 68 pairs ranked by net gap, with the cards named
- Every recorded sale behind both medians — dated, priced, linked to the listing
- Real sold prices, US and Japan, and the cross-border spread on every card page
- Live asks across 30+ Asian and global markets, with worldwide listing deep-links
How this is computed
The rules, and what each word means
- A real recorded sale
- A transaction we recorded, at a price, on a venue, on a date. Both sides of every row on this page are made of them. A live listing is an asking price and never counts. A marketplace price-guide point — TCGplayer market, Cardmarket trend — is not a sale either; we hold far more of those than real ones, which is exactly why they are excluded here. Sales our integrity filter flagged as shill, wash or outlier are dropped before anything is averaged.
- A date we observed rather than a date published
- Mercari Japan's sold listings carry a price but no sale date, so for those rows the date shown is the day we saw the listing as sold — an upper bound on when it sold, not the sale date. Rows resting on one are marked observed dates. eBay and Yahoo! Japan both publish real sale timestamps.
- One grade tier
- Every comparison is inside one grader, one grade, one print run and one raw condition. A PSA 10 is never set against a raw copy; a 1st Edition never against an Unlimited. Where we cannot confirm the tier on a sale, that sale is dropped rather than assumed.
- Net of costs
- Tracked insured shipping for the corridor, the destination's import tax — 15% into the United States since the $800 de-minimis exemption ended in August 2025, 10% into Japan, 20% into the EU — and the selling venue's own fee on the sale price. A gross gap ignores all three and is the reason cross-border "arbitrage" is usually a mirage.
- 3 sales on each side, minimum
- Two prices are not a market. Below 3 recorded sales per side a median is a coin toss, and the row does not appear at all — it is not shown with a warning, it is absent.
- Not advice
- Everything here is a description of prices that were already paid. Hoshino does not forecast prices, does not tell anyone what to buy, and does not promise that any gap on this page can be captured. Shipping a card across a border carries real risk of loss, damage, customs delay and grading disputes that no price gap accounts for.
Recomputed from the live database. Last run 19 Sept 2026.
Real sold prices, on both sides of the Pacific.
Track a card and we will tell you what it is doing in Japan as well as at home.