ARS Grading vs PSA: Can You Grade Japanese Cards in Japan?

You have priced a PSA submission, seen $79.99 before shipping even starts, and then noticed that Japan has its own grading company. ARS (アルス) is the country’s first TCG 鑑定 (kantei — authentication and grading) house, and its entry fee is ¥3,850. You cannot use it from abroad. ARS limits applications to people living in Japan, and it says so in a single sentence tucked into one page footer. Here is where that sentence is, what the service costs the people who can use it, and what the gap between ¥3,850 and $79.99 is actually buying.

Can I get my Japanese cards graded in Japan instead of sending them to PSA?

No — not through ARS, and not through PSA’s Tokyo branch either. Both restrict submissions to residents of Japan. The difference is that PSA states its rule on a support page in English, while ARS states its rule once, in Japanese, in small print at the bottom of a page most readers never open.

Here is the like-for-like on a single card worth about ¥30,000, which is the band where most chase singles from a current set land.

Two numbers do most of the work here. ARS is about a third of the price of either PSA route, and it is about three times slower than PSA Japan’s Regular tier unless you pay for express. Neither of those is the deciding factor, because the last column is.

PSA’s position has not changed since our PSA guide: its support page still says the Japan branch “only accepts submissions from residents of Japan,” and points everyone else to the US office, where Regular is $79.99 with a $1,500 insured cap and Value tiers are paused.

The one sentence on the ARS site that settles it

Search the ARS price page for a residency rule and you will not find one. Same on the FAQ, the application page, the company page, and all fourteen articles of the 申込規約 (mōshikomi kiyaku — submission terms). The rule exists in exactly one place: the footer of the service guide at ars-grading.com/service/plans.

※現在お申し込みいただけるのは、日本国内にお住まいの方に限らせていただいております。

“Applications are currently limited to those residing within Japan.” That is the whole statement — one line, below the fold, under four plan descriptions that never mention it.

This is worth flagging precisely because it is the opposite of the pattern we found in Japanese buyback services, where not one of five companies wrote the rule down and the exclusion had to be reconstructed from ID lists and registered-mail requirements. ARS did write it down. It just wrote it somewhere nobody scrolls, in the language the people it excludes are least likely to read.

The rest of the site confirms the sentence is deliberate rather than a stale note. ARS describes its own model as 国内完結型 (kokunai kanketsu-gata) — everything from intake to dispatch handled at domestic sites, which it says 「海外配送のリスクを排除し」, eliminates the risk of overseas shipping. A company that treats international freight as a risk to design out is not quietly accepting international submissions.

The plumbing agrees. Return shipping is Japan Post ゆうパック (Yu-Pack), and the published rate table runs ¥900 for Tōhoku through Tōkai, ¥1,000 for Kinki, ¥1,100 for Chūgoku and Shikoku, ¥1,300 for Hokkaidō and Kyūshū, ¥1,400 for Okinawa — five Japanese regions and no international row. Payment is 銀行振込のみ (ginkō furikomi nomi), bank transfer only, to a domestic Japanese bank, with credit cards and e-payments listed as unavailable. One clause cuts slightly the other way: Article 4 of the terms says the customer bears a designated fee on remittances involving an overseas account, so somebody at ARS has thought about foreign money at least once. It does not amount to an offer, and it does not survive contact with a shipping table that stops at Okinawa.

What ARS charges to grade a card

ARS prices by 申告価格 (shinkoku kakaku — the declared value you assign the card), not by how fast you want it. There are three plan families: Standard up to ¥1,000,000, Advanced up to ¥10,000,000, and Premium above that. These are the Standard tiers, which cover essentially every modern single.

Above Standard, Advanced-I (¥1,000,000–¥1,500,000) is ¥77,000 tax-included and the ladder runs to ¥1,100,000 for a card declared over ¥50,000,000. Two more per-card options sit alongside: エクスプレス鑑定 (express) at ¥2,200, and ホルダーチェンジ (holder change), which takes a card out of another company’s slab and re-encapsulates it — ¥3,080 at the entry tier, billed on top of the grading fee.

That declared value is where the money moves, and it is not a formality.

The other billing trap is the floor. A card returned without a holder — below your chosen minimum grade, oversize, out of scope, or outside the condition standards — is still charged. The terms put the fee for a non-encapsulated return at the Standard-I rate. Getting nothing back but the raw card costs ¥3,850.

How you apply, and why the window matters more than the price

ARS does not run a permanently open submission form. Intake opens in announced windows, and when a window is shut the registration page returns a closed notice — which is what both the general and express pages returned when we checked on August 12, 2026. The general service listed its next intake for around October 2026; the most recent express window ran from 19:00 on August 7 to 18:59 on August 9, a 48-hour slot capped at 20 cards.

Two constraints in that flow bite harder than the fee. Only one application per person is accepted per window, counted per address — 同一住所1名 — so a household cannot split a backlog across a single intake. And on express, if the first-come allocation fills, remaining applicants are moved into a 抽選枠 (chūsen waku), a lottery. Even for someone standing in Tokyo, a submission is a scheduled event you have to be ready for, not an errand.

ARS or PSA: what the slab actually does

If you do have a Japanese address, the choice is not simply the cheaper one. The two graders are optimized for different things, and the terms of each say so plainly.

The honest summary is that ARS is priced for volume within Japan and PSA is priced for a market that spans borders. A grade only means something to a buyer who knows the scale, so if the people you would eventually sell to are outside Japan, the cheaper slab is not automatically the useful one. That has nothing to do with what either holder does for the card physically — both are ultrasonically sealed and both protect it.

Also worth knowing before you assume a slab is a guarantee of anything: ARS states that its results can vary slightly between graders and submission dates, and that its standards are updated over time, so an old grade may not match a current one. Every grader has some version of this clause. Few write it as directly.

What to do instead

The useful thing about ARS is not that it is a route you can take. It is that it shows you what the domestic price of grading a Japanese card really is: ¥3,850, three months, and a Yu-Pack label. Everything on top of that in your own quote is the cost of not living here — and once you can see it separately, it gets much easier to decide whether a slab is worth buying rather than making.