🎟️ Part Collecting. Part Lottery.

Walk into a convenience store, bookstore, hobby shop, or anime store in Japan and you may find a large display filled with figures, plushies, acrylic stands, glasses, towels, keychains and other character merchandise.

But you can't just grab the figure off the shelf and buy it.

Instead, you buy a Kuji ticket. Your ticket reveals a prize tier—A, B, C, D and so on—and you receive the corresponding prize.

There isn't a pile of losing tickets.

Of course, whether the tiny acrylic charm you just pulled feels like a "win" while the giant A Prize figure is still staring at you from behind the counter is another question entirely.

Maybe one more ticket...

🅰️ What's With All the Letters?

Every Ichiban Kuji has its own prize lineup, but generally the biggest prizes sit toward the top.

🏆 And Then There's the Last One Prize

Here's where Kuji gets interesting.

The person who buys the very last ticket remaining in the lottery receives an additional exclusive prize known as the Last One Prize.

Sometimes it's an entirely unique figure. Sometimes it's a special colorway or alternate version of another major prize.

And it completely changes the math.

There are 60 tickets left? Probably not happening.

There are six tickets left, though—and you've been staring at that Last One figure for the last ten minutes?

Suddenly buying all six tickets starts sounding like an extremely responsible financial decision.

This is how Kuji gets you.

That's also how some of these prizes eventually make their way from Japan to Akiba Vault.

Kuji is one of our favorite parts of Japanese collecting because the system constantly produces figures and merchandise that you won't normally find sitting on a retail shelf in the United States.

So when we're out hunting in Japan and find particularly cool Kuji prizes, some of them end up making the trip back to the Vault.

Explore some of the Ichiban Kuji currently in the Vault below.