PSA Starts Local Grading In Japan

Grading
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This is kind of a FYI post since it will only affect people in Japan.

Starting from this month, PSA’s branch in Japan will start grading locally in Japan instead of sending all the cards to the States to have them graded and send back. They also revised their service tiers for grading in Japan:

  • No Bulk tiers
  • Value - 3300JPY (around $23) versus $25 in US
  • No Value Plus
  • Regular - 8800JPY (around $61) versus $75 in US
  • XP - 16500JPY (around $115) versus $150 in US
  • SXP - 33000JPY (around $229) versus $300 in US
  • WT - 66000JPY (around $457) versus $600 in US
  • Premium - price will be the US price of corresponding premium level * 110 - for example, Premium 2 is $2000 in US and 2000 x 110 = 220000 JPY in Japan

XP and above will be significantly cheaper than US given how weak Japanese Yen is right now, however for some reason turnaround time is a whopping 5 months for all tiers, plus grading standards in Japan is still unknown comparing to US, so flippers are likely to stick with US submissions for now.

Also, Japan only takes local submissions, so people outside Japan will still have to submit to the States directly.

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I wonder if the slabs will be in Japanese as well :eyes:

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this is massive. dump all your japanese psa cards for super cheap yes yes

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that would be dope tbh

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That would be really cool

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Thanks for posting this. The grading turnaround time however is far too long, and not offering a bulk cost makes this even worse to consider for me unfortunately. They seem to be accepting max 150 cards per person per month and will stop accepting cards in general once they get too much.

I will say though, I wouldn’t risk grading here since as much as they probably receive training from PSA USA, I can see standards here being higher. They’ll go by the rulebook 200% and even the slightest nanometre of edge whitening will bring you to a 9.

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Wow, this is huge. It was only a matter of time until CU learned that shipping orders is more costly in the long-run than grading in-house abroad.

I’m curious what Japanese consumers will send in for grading. :eyes:

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Well 5 months is faster than the 9 months that I’m used to, so that’s nice.
We’ll have to wait and see whether the standards are stricter or not, but I’m personally not worried and would imagine that PSA will want there to be no noticeable difference between the standards, and will have trained staff accordingly.
Still waiting on bulk though…

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Nice. Can get screwed by a PSA baito instead of a card shop hustler baito now.

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This will be very interesting to observe on what are the longer term (2024 onwards) affects of this decision. Will this bring about a culture shift and more openness to grading locally in Japan?

As someone who buys raw cards from the secondary market, grading ensures that you get what you pay for, card quality wise, no more speculation, gambling and fingers crossed etc. But it also means that you need to pay a premium for the graded cards and look a lot more harder to find good deals on raw cards.

Cheers!

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Will this see a huge rise in old back cards being graded ? Always wondered how many mint copies of old back set holos are out there, pop reports are pretty low all things considered

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It’d be nice to get a more fleshed out old back promo pop report, hopefully this helps!