US Duty on Cards Mailed From Japan: The July 24 Postal Rules

You bought a ¥800 single. It still has to clear US customs, and somebody has to pay for that before the parcel leaves Japan. Since Friday, July 24, 2026, the $800 de minimis exemption is suspended for anything reaching the US through the international postal network, and Japan Post will only accept a US-bound merchandise parcel at a designated post office, with duty pre-paid by the sender and a DDP label on the box. The rule did not just add a cost. It moved the work to the sending side, which is why your order from Tokyo suddenly behaves differently than it did in March.

Do I have to pay US customs duty on Pokémon cards mailed from Japan now?

Yes, and it is paid up front by the sender in Japan rather than collected from you on delivery. There is no value small enough to escape it: US Customs and Border Protection’s interim final rule suspends the duty-free pass for postal shipments indefinitely, and Japan Post’s mailing conditions treat cards as merchandise at every price point.

The suspension is written into 19 CFR 145.31(b), which now says the exemption “is suspended for merchandise arriving through the international postal network” until CBP announces otherwise in the Federal Register. A second rule published the same day, FR Doc 2026-12670, did the same thing for every non-postal mode — DHL, FedEx, air cargo — effective a month earlier, on June 24, 2026. So the courier workaround people reached for last year is also closed.

Japan Post’s US mailing conditions since July 24

This table is the operative document for anyone actually standing at a counter in Japan. It is Japan Post’s own, effective July 24, 2026, translated.

Two rows surprise people. The second one, because a ¥800 card gets the same treatment as a ¥60,000 booster box — the $100 line is about what is in the parcel, not what it cost. And the fourth, because it looks like a loophole and is not: above $2,500, CBP requires a formal entry for the mail importation, which is a heavier process handled on the US side. Japan Post skips prepayment there because prepayment is not the mechanism anymore.

Two more conditions from the same page: the list of designated post offices is regional and Japan Post says it is being expanded progressively, so the nearest one today may not be the nearest one next month. And separately from all of the above, any parcel whose contents exceed ¥200,000 requires an export declaration to Japanese customs.

What the sender in Japan actually has to do

Not “pay a fee.” Five steps, most of them on a phone, in Japanese.

There is a cost at step 2 that nobody publishes a number for. Japan Post states plainly that using the app to pay duty incurs a fee set by Zonos, and does not say what it is. Treat it as a real per-parcel line item you cannot look up in advance — which is the single strongest argument for consolidating orders.

Why some Japanese sellers and proxies now refuse US addresses

Look at that sequence from the point of view of an individual Mercari seller in Osaka who ships four parcels a week. Every non-US destination is the old routine: fill in the label at home, walk to the corner post office. Every US destination now means an app in a foreign workflow, a card payment to a US-facing provider, a label that must come from that app, and a trip to a specific branch that may not be the corner one. The economics of that are obvious for one ¥3,000 order.

The burden is structural, not squeamish. CBP’s new postal informal entry process is only open to a party with the right to make entry under 19 CFR 143.26(a) — the owner or purchaser of the goods, or a licensed customs broker they designate — and new 19 CFR 145.15 requires that filer to hold a basic importation and entry bond before the shipment is released. That is why this runs through a certified provider with a fee attached instead of being a checkbox at the counter. CBP’s own economic discussion notes an estimated two-thirds drop in mail shipments after the global de minimis suspension, so the volume response was expected.

If you are already using a proxy, do not assume it has adapted. Check its current US policy on its own page before you check out, and specifically whether the DDP prepayment and the provider fee are inside the quote or billed afterward. Our proxy fee comparison covers the base fee structures; this is a new line on top of them, and none of the published fee tables were built with it in mind.

The parts of CBP’s rule that touch a card parcel

Note what the rule does not do: it sets no duty rate for trading cards. What you owe depends on classification and country of origin, and it is computed in the provider’s app at prepayment. Anyone quoting you a flat percentage for a card parcel is inventing it.

What this changes about how you buy

The consolidation math moved. It always favored one parcel over three because of postage tiers; now each additional US-bound parcel also carries its own prepayment transaction and its own provider fee, so the gap is wider than the shipping table alone suggests. If you are working through a proxy, batch your wants and release them together rather than trickling out orders — the mechanics of that are in our proxy shipping cost breakdown.

Do not run it in reverse. CBP’s rule addresses splitting directly: separate shipments under $2,500 mailed at different times cannot be combined for the purpose of requiring formal entry, “unless there was a splitting of shipments in order to avoid the payment of customs duty.” Breaking one order into five to duck a threshold is the case the sentence exists for.

For everyone outside the US, none of this applies. Both rules are US import rules and Japan Post’s changed conditions cover US and US-territory destinations only, so the ordinary routes in our guide to buying Japanese Pokémon cards still work as written. Thresholds and tax treatment for other countries are in our import tax and customs guide, which is the right page if you are not shipping to a US address.

And if you are: the practical read is that the era of the cheap untaxed single from Japan is over on the US lane specifically, and the friction is concentrated in one trip to one counter in Japan. Whoever makes that trip is the person you should be asking questions of before you pay.