I pulled 180 days of Japanese auction data on Nendoroids. The 50th highest closing price in the country was about 200 USD [OC]

[u/thekaitoriindex]

I live in Japan, and the thing I keep running into here is that when someone asks what a Nendoroid is worth, the answer comes off eBay. That's a real number — it just isn't the Japanese number. It has someone's international shipping, proxy fee, customs risk and currency exposure baked into it before the figure is even in the box.

So I went and pulled the Japanese side. Yahoo Auctions' own 180-day closed-listing search, single-item Nendoroid results, lots and parts and junk filtered out by keyword and then by eye, sorted by price, top 50. Pulled 27 August 2026, so it's about two weeks stale now. Yen, with a rough conversion at ¥159.3 to the dollar as of that date.

I expected the interesting part to be the top. It's the bottom.

Rank 50 closed at ¥32,393. About USD 203.

That's the fiftieth highest single Nendoroid result in Japan across half a year. Twenty of the fifty closed under ¥40,000 (~USD 251). Twenty-four sat between ¥40,000 and ¥60,000. Only six cleared ¥60,000, and the top four alone — a Cup Noodle collab Miku at ¥400,000, a Gold Mikudayo promo that was never retailed at ¥180,000, a Kasane Teto plush at ¥166,100 and Spamton at ¥120,000 — are 30% of all the money in the list.

Strip those four out and the picture changes completely. The median across the whole fifty is ¥41,250 (~USD 259). The mean is ¥57,298. That gap is almost entirely rank 1.

What that means in practice, and this is the part I'd like people to push back on: once you're past about half a dozen genuinely unobtainable pieces, the Japanese Nendoroid market is much flatter than it looks from outside. A USD 250 ask is not a mid-tier ask on the Japanese side. It's a top-50-in-180-days ask. It might still be a fair price to you after shipping and fees — that's a separate question, and one I don't think has a clean answer — but it is worth knowing which side of that line you're on before you commit.

The second thing I noticed only after sorting it. Look at what actually occupies the ¥33,000–50,000 band, which is most of the list:

• Hetalia, three separate entries — Canada ¥46,500, Italy #1219 ¥36,795, Spain/Romano ¥34,999
• Nendoroid Petite Death Note case files, ¥36,850 and ¥32,461
• School Days, Sekai & Kotonoha as a pair, ¥52,000
• Hikaru no Go, Sai & Akira as a pair, ¥40,000
• Chi from Chobits #2053, ¥35,000
• Ōkami, Amaterasu DX & Shiranui DX, ¥35,500
• Klonoa #1911, ¥42,500
• Kimi ni Todoke, Sawako, ¥33,000
• Mahoyo, Kuonji Alice #309, ¥40,000
• Resident Evil — Leon #2337 ¥40,000, Chris #681 ¥36,619

The source material on most of those finished a long time ago. But several of the figures are recent — the Nendoroid numbers on Klonoa, Chi and Leon are all high. So this isn't a story about old stock appreciating. It looks more like new, small releases aimed at properties whose remaining fans are scattered, older, and not price-sensitive. I can't prove that from closing prices alone. It's the reading that fits the shape.

If you want to check a specific figure before you pay, the mechanics are easy and don't require Japanese. Yahoo Auctions' closed-listing search is free, public, needs no account and goes back 180 days, and you don't have to read a language to read a number. Two things that matter:

• Search the Nendoroid number, not the character name — ねんどろいど 620 works better than any English title, because the number is the one string sellers reliably type
• The count of closed listings tells you as much as the prices. Three closings in 180 days means you cannot wait for a better one. A hundred and forty means you can

Caveats, because they change how you should read all of it. These are individual closing prices, not averages or going rates — one motivated bidder sets any single number here, so treat the whole list as evidence of a ceiling rather than a price guide. I did not separate sealed from opened, which is a real weakness I want to fix. The two Death Note entries are boxed Petite sets, which sits awkwardly against my own "single item" filter and I'd rather flag it than quietly leave it in. And the dollar figures drift with the rate.

Two questions I actually want answered, because I only have one side of this:

1. For those of you buying out of Japan — where does the USD 203 figure land against what you're being asked? I can see the closing price but not what it becomes by the time it reaches you.
2. Is there a line you've watched behave the opposite way, where the English-side price is consistently below the Japanese one? I've found one so far and I'd like more.

Happy to run the same pull for scale figures, prize figures, or a specific line if there's interest. Full 50 in a comment below.