Editorial Policy

Sourcing

• Official Japanese sources — The Pokémon Company's announcements, publisher release pages, and marketplace listings — are our primary sources. We read them in the original Japanese and link to them directly.
• Every article ends with a Sources section listing the pages we relied on. If we can't source a claim, we don't print it.
• Rumors and leaks are labeled as such when we cover them at all, and are never presented as confirmed facts.

Prices and dates

• Prices are checked against live listings or official pricing at the time of writing, and each article states when its figures were recorded. Card prices move — treat any number as a snapshot, not a guarantee.
• Release dates come from official announcements. If a date is unconfirmed or has changed, we say so.
• Tokyo shop reports describe stock and pricing we verified in person, with the date of the visit.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it promptly. Material corrections — wrong prices, wrong dates, wrong set contents — are noted in the article itself rather than silently edited away. If you spot an error, report it via the contact page.

Affiliate links and advertising

Tokyo Card Report may use affiliate programs to cover its running costs. If an article contains affiliate links, that article will say so on the page.

• Affiliate relationships never determine what we cover or what we conclude. A service earning us a commission gets the same scrutiny as one that doesn't.
• We only link to services we would point a collector to anyway, based on published fees, terms, and track record.
• Nothing on this site is investment advice. Market articles explain data and context; what you buy is your call.

The Sourcing Desk and our independence

Tokyo Card Report operates the Tokyo Sourcing Desk. Its job is to work out the best way to buy something from Japan and tell you: send a want list and we check the live Japanese listings and send back a free report — the listings we would pick, the yen price, condition notes, and an all-in estimate including proxy fees and shipping. You buy directly from the links in it. We disclose this openly: it is our own service, and links to it appear on the site.

Two things follow from that, and we would rather state them than have you find them. First, the reports may contain affiliate links: Buyee and eBay pay us a commission if you buy through them, and services such as ZenMarket and Neokyo pay us nothing. That asymmetry runs in one direction, so our comparisons of proxy services are built from each company's own published fee pages, and a report names the cheaper route for your basket even when it is one we earn nothing from. Second, where a report turns up an unusually large gap between the Japanese price and what you would pay at home, we may separately offer to handle that purchase ourselves — that is a quoted offer made to you by email, never a condition of the free report.

AI disclosure

We use AI tools to help draft and structure articles. Every published piece is reviewed by the editorial team, which selects what runs, verifies claims against the cited sources, and takes responsibility for the final text.