ARS Grading vs PSA Japan: Grading Costs and Who Can Submit

You have a PSA quote in front of you and an obvious question: does Japan, where the card was printed, have a cheaper door? It has two. PSA runs a Japanese branch grading at ¥11,980 a card, and Japan has its own house, ARS (アルス), at ¥3,850. Both are locked to residents of Japan — PSA says so on an English support page, ARS says so once, in Japanese, at the bottom of one page. Here is what each costs, who can submit, and what is left for everyone else.

Can you get cards PSA graded in Japan?

Yes — if you live there. PSA’s Japan branch takes submissions through psacard.co.jp, and PSA’s support page says it “currently only accepts submissions from residents of Japan,” pointing everyone else to the US office. ARS applies the same restriction, so being in Japan on a trip opens neither route.

Like-for-like on one card worth about ¥30,000:

Return and payment split the same way: ARS ships back by Yu-Pack inside Japan and takes Japanese bank transfer only. PSA US is the one row that assumes an international customer.

How much does PSA grading cost in Japan?

¥11,980 per card, tax included, at レギュラー (Regular) — PSA Japan’s cheapest live tier as of September 6, 2026, for a card declared at ¥250,000 or less, quoted at 60 business days. The cheaper Value tiers below it are suspended, exactly as they are on PSA’s US list.

Premium tiers run above these, topping out at ¥1,499,980 a card. Two things the headline hides: insurance and return shipping are separate line items on their own rate table, so ¥11,980 is a floor rather than a quote; and turnaround is counted from the arrival notice email, with PSA Japan currently estimating two to two and a half months between that email and the order number appearing.

How do you submit cards to PSA in Japan?

Through psacard.co.jp: you register an account, build the order online, sleeve each card and seat it in a Card Saver, then ship it to PSA’s Japanese facility yourself. There is no intake window and no lottery — but there is a residency requirement, and no overseas application path.

What a submitter needs is a Japanese address for the return leg and a Japanese payment method. Receiving runs Monday to Friday, and PSA Japan estimates two to three business days to acknowledge arrival.

If you live outside Japan none of that is available, and there is no workaround at the form level — the residency question is answered by whoever signs the submission. Your route is PSA’s US office, with one caveat: PSA’s support page notes the US facility is subject to current US tariff rules and submissions may be restricted. The US fee table, the BGS and CGC alternatives and the proxy-hold trick are in our PSA grading guide.

What grading services are available in Japan?

Two that matter for trading cards: PSA’s Japanese branch and ARS, the country’s first domestic TCG 鑑定 (kantei — authentication and grading) house. BGS and CGC have no Japanese intake facility, so using them means shipping abroad wherever you live. Both Japanese options are closed to non-residents, which is why “grade it in Japan” is not a plan an overseas collector can execute.

PSA writes its rule in English, on a support page, where someone would look. ARS writes its rule once. It is not on the price page, the FAQ, the application page or any of the fourteen articles of the 申込規約 (submission terms). It exists in one place: the footer of 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.” One line, below the fold, in the language the people it excludes are least likely to read. It is still more than the Japanese buyback services manage, where not one of five companies wrote the rule down at all.

The plumbing agrees. Return shipping is Japan Post ゆうパック (Yu-Pack), ¥900 for Tōhoku through Tōkai rising to ¥1,400 for Okinawa — five Japanese regions, no international row. Payment is 銀行振込のみ, bank transfer only, to a domestic Japanese bank; cards and e-payments are unavailable.

What ARS charges, and when you can actually apply

ARS prices by 申告価格 (shinkoku kakaku — the declared value you assign the card), not by speed. The Standard tiers cover essentially every modern single.

Above Standard the ladder runs to ¥1,100,000. Express adds ¥2,200 a card, a printed certificate ¥1,100 at the entry tier. That declared value is where the money moves.

The other trap is the floor: a card returned without a holder — below your minimum grade, oversize, out of scope — is still billed at the Standard-I rate. Getting the raw card back costs ¥3,850.

Then there is the door itself. ARS has no permanently open form; intake runs in announced windows. Checked September 6, 2026: general grading was closed, next intake listed as around October 2026 — the same estimate the page carried a month earlier — while express ran 19:00 on September 11 to 18:59 on September 13, capped at 10 cards.

Two constraints bite harder than the fee: one application per person per window, counted per address (同一住所1名), so a household cannot split a backlog across one intake; and on express, once the first-come allocation fills, the rest go into a 抽選枠 (chūsen waku), a lottery.

ARS or PSA: what the slab actually does

If you do have a Japanese address, the choice is not simply the cheaper one.

ARS is priced for volume inside Japan; PSA is priced for a market that spans borders. A grade only means something to a buyer who knows the scale, so if you would eventually sell outside Japan, the cheaper slab is not the useful one.

What to do if you are outside Japan

The useful thing about the Japanese graders is not that they are routes you can take. It is that they show what grading a Japanese card costs at home: ¥3,850 and a Yu-Pack label at ARS, ¥11,980 and a domestic courier at PSA Japan. 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 easier to decide whether a slab is worth buying rather than making.