Gashapon Capsule Toys: Bring Coins
Once you start noticing the machines, you see them in places that are not shops for them — a row beside a convenience store counter, a bank of them in the concourse of a station, a few inside the ticket gates. Most people arrive with the idea that a turn costs 100 yen.
On the official product list, almost none of them cost that. We counted every item listed on the official product search on 13 September 2026: 500 products, of which 477 were priced at 300, 400 or 500 yen.
That is the number that decides what you should have in your pocket before you stand in front of one.
What A Gashapon Machine Is
One machine holds one product. It is self-service: you put money in, turn the handle, and a plastic capsule drops into the tray.
The official product page for each item lists how many different versions exist — four types, three types — and nothing about picking one. We found no official page that describes how the machine decides which version comes out, and none that offers you a way to choose.
What One Turn Costs
Bandai’s own FAQ gives the range as 100 to 2,500 yen.
That range is true and not very useful, so we counted the listing itself. Of the 500 products on the official product search on 13 September 2026:
| Price | Products |
|---|---|
| 300 yen | 175 |
| 400 yen | 172 |
| 500 yen | 130 |
| 600–1,500 yen | 19 |
| 200–550 yen | 4 |
The cheapest was 200 yen and the most expensive 1,500 yen, and every 1,500-yen item we saw was marked as belonging to a premium line.
Two things about that count. It is a count of one list on one day, not of the machines standing in shops, and the products on it turn over constantly. And the price is set per machine: two machines side by side in the same shop can be 300 yen and 500 yen. The official finder does list prices for the products in a given shop (below), but the price that applies to you is the one printed on the front of the machine you are standing at.
How You Pay
This is the part worth preparing for.
The operator’s FAQ answers the question directly, and the answer is the same for both of its specialist shop chains. In our translation:
Some stores also have cashless machines that accept transit IC cards such as Suica.
Read that carefully, because it is doing two things at once. Cashless machines exist. And they are some machines, in some stores — the FAQ does not say which stores, and we found no list of them on the official site. Credit cards and QR payment are not mentioned at all.
So the honest description is: you may find a machine that takes your IC card, and we found no official page that tells you where those machines are.
That leaves one thing you can do about it in advance.
Carry coins. At the three prices that covered 477 of those 500 products, a single turn is three to five 100-yen coins — more for the premium lines — and it is worth having more than one turn’s worth, because the version you want is one of several in the same machine. We are not going to tell you the machines take nothing else — we do not know that, and neither the official product site nor the operator’s site says what any given machine accepts.
We also could not find anything official about change machines, in Japanese or in English, on any page we looked at. We are not saying there are none. We are saying we could not confirm it, so do not plan on one.
What Comes Out
The official page for each product tells you four things and stops: when it goes on sale, the price, how many types there are, and the minimum age.
It does not say whether the thing inside needs assembling, whether it comes with a backing card, or what the capsule contains besides the toy. Some products clearly are built from parts — there are lines where the model is finished only when you have collected several different capsules — but that is a property of individual products, and it is not written anywhere general.
If that matters to you, the official product page is where to look, and what it will give you is the number of types.
Where The Gashapon Machines Are
Bandai runs an official finder for this, called Gashapon Doko (“where is the gashapon”). It is at gashapon.jp, and it has no English.
You can still use it. You pick a prefecture from a list, or you let it use your location, and it draws a map with the shops on it and a list underneath. Each row is a shop name, an address, and how far away it is — the distance is a number in metres, which reads the same in any language.
What came up when we ran it in central Tokyo was not only specialist shops. There were convenience stores, a furniture store, a machine set inside the concourse of a major station, and one listed as being inside the ticket gates — which puts it on the far side of a barrier you pass with a ticket.
The finder carries three warnings, all in Japanese. The one that matters most, in our translation:
This searches only shops where machines with a communication function are installed. It does not show every shop.
So the map is a floor, not a ceiling — by the operator’s own wording, it is not a complete list of where the machines are.
Checking Before You Go
The same site does something we did not expect: it publishes what is in a given shop right now.
Open a shop and you get a list of the products in it, each with its price and a stock mark — a circle for in stock, a triangle for nearly gone — and a timestamp for when the list was last updated. The one we opened had been updated at 11:00 that morning.
It is genuinely useful and it is Japanese only. The shop pages also carry a line saying the listing and the real shelf can differ.
One more split to know about. The finder does not show opening hours. For the two specialist chains, those live on the operator’s corporate site instead, which does have English — store pages there give the address, the nearest stations and the hours. The stock is on one site and the hours are on the other, and only one of them is translated.
A warning about that English. It is machine translation, and it is not always safe on names: one store page we opened had the shop’s name rendered with the name of an unrelated attraction inside it. Use it for addresses and hours, and check a name against the Japanese page before you go looking for it.
Before You Go
Everything above was checked on 13 September 2026 (2026-09-13).
The price count is ours: 500 products on the official product search, read and tallied on that date. It describes that list on that day — not the machines in any particular shop, and not the range you will meet next year. The quoted wording is our translation of the official Japanese pages.
We have not stood in front of these machines with a specific one in mind for this article, and the questions we could not answer from the official sources — which machines take IC cards, what any machine accepts, where you change a note — are left unanswered above rather than guessed at.
Sources: Gashapon official product search · Gashapon Doko — shop finder · Bandai Namco Amusement FAQ — cashless machines · Gashapon Department Store — store information (all checked 2026-09-13)
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