Ichiban Kuji: Where It Is Sold Changes With Every Set
Ichiban Kuji is a lottery you draw over a shop counter. You pay for a ticket, peel it open, and hand it back for the prize printed on it. There are no losing tickets — every ticket is a prize, from a large figure at the top to a clear file at the bottom, and on most sets the last ticket in the box wins an extra one of its own.
It runs on boxes, not on shelves. A set is sold until the box is empty, and then that shop is done with it.
Which makes the useful question not what is out this month but where this month's set is being sold — because that answer is different for every set, and it is not the answer most people assume.
Quick Facts
| What it costs | ¥550 to ¥1,450 a ticket across the sixteen sets listed in September 2026. Six of them were ¥850 |
|---|---|
| How you get it | Draw at the counter, collect on the spot |
| Booking | None. Sold until the box runs out |
| Where | Different for every set. See below |
| From abroad | The official online shop ships within Japan only |
| Announced | The lineup ran five months ahead when we looked |
| Sale time | Not published. The official pages give a release date, not a time, and say the timing can differ by shop |
How An Ichiban Kuji Draw Works
The mechanics are four steps, and the official site publishes them in English — not translated captions under a Japanese diagram, but the diagrams themselves redrawn in English.
Take a ticket voucher to the register. Pay, then choose your ticket from the box. Peel it and read the letter printed inside. Hand it over and take the prize away with you.
Nothing is posted to you. The English diagram says it in four words: Get it on the spot. What thirty-five tickets actually produced, on one morning in one set, is written up separately.
Tiers run from A down — how far down depends on the set. Of the two we looked at closely, one ran A to I, the other stopped at D. A last-one prize goes to whoever empties the box, though the official site notes that some sets do not have one.
Where It Is Sold Changes With Every Set
Here is the part that costs people a day.
We read the retailer line on all sixteen sets listed in September 2026. The convenience-store chain is decided per set, and the sets do not overlap:
| Of sixteen sets | Where you could buy it |
|---|---|
| 6 sets | One convenience chain, plus bookshops and hobby shops |
| 3 sets | A different chain, plus bookshops and hobby shops |
| 2 sets | A third chain, plus its group's supermarkets |
| 1 set | Smaller chains and other convenience stores |
| 4 sets | The official online shop and the official shops only — no convenience store, no bookshop |
Not one of the sixteen was in two rival chains at once. If a set is a Lawson set, it is not in 7-Eleven, and the reverse holds too.
And a quarter of them were never in a convenience store. Four of the sixteen were sold through the official online shop and the official shops and nowhere else.
Beyond the chains, the retailer lines named bookshops, hobby shops, drugstores and group supermarkets. The one place you should not assume is the convenience store you happen to be standing in.
Using The Shop Finder
The official site has a shop finder, and it is the tool the site gives you for this. It works like this:
- Choose the set from a dropdown. Every entry is in Japanese
- Choose a prefecture. Also Japanese, forty-seven of them
- Choose a city or ward. The count of shops appears beside each name — Chiyoda 52, Minato 62, Shinjuku 64, on the day we looked
- Press search
What comes back is a list of shops with names, addresses and a route link. For Chiyoda ward, on one set, we got fifty-two.
The ones at the top of the list were not convenience stores. They were a second-hand anime chain, an arcade, a discount store, an electronics store, and a character shop inside Tokyo Station — the kind of shop we have written about before.
There is also a search from your current location, within two kilometres, which needs no Japanese typing at all. We could not test it from here.
What The Finder Does Not Tell You
A shop on the list is a shop that carries the set. It is not a shop that still has it.
Each result does show a status — sold out or on sale from — and both are printed in Japanese. That helps, but the official page qualifies it in two lines that are themselves only in Japanese:
Even if a shop appears in the search, the release date may differ by shop and it may already be sold out. The "sold out" label is not always shown.
So the label is a hint, not a stock check. The line above it, about shop names and addresses possibly being out of date, is translated into English. These two are not.
Nor are you meant to ring ahead. Every set page carries the same line: please refrain from contacting shops. So the finder tells you which shops carry a set, and the label may or may not say it has gone. Short of a phone call the official pages ask you not to make, going and looking is what is left.
What Is Not In English
The site's frame is translated — the menus, the shop finder, the four-step diagram. The parts with the numbers in them are not.
Set pages stay in Japanese. The price per ticket, the list of tiers, and the retailer line all live there, and choosing English does not change them; we tried twice and waited.
The official online shop has no English at all. No language switch, no translation layer, and its help site is the same.
And it does not ship abroad. The terms page says so three times, and adds that orders received through forwarding services are not supported. So for the four sets of sixteen that skipped the shelves, the online route was closed from outside Japan. Those four were still sold at the official shops, which are in Japan — so they were reachable, but only in person.
That is a harder wall than the one at the Tokyo Station shop we looked at, where at least the goods sit on a shelf and can be bought over the counter.
What We Could Not Find Out
How many tickets are in a box. Not published on the set pages we read.
Whether a card issued outside Japan is accepted online. The terms list card, carrier billing and PayPay, and say nothing about the issuing country. It does not matter much while the shipping restriction stands.
Whether the location search and map search work. We could not grant location access from here.
How many shops carry a set nationwide. The finder counts by city, and we did not find a national figure.
What time a set goes on sale. We looked at all sixteen set pages, the how-to pages, the shop finder and the help site, and found no time of day anywhere. The official line is that the release timing can differ by shop.
Before You Go
Everything above was checked on 6 September 2026.
The prices, the retailer lines and the tier structures come from the official set pages — sixteen of them, all that were listed that day. The four-step diagram, the shop finder and its notes come from the official site's English pages. The shipping restriction comes from the online shop's legal terms page.
Sets change monthly, and the prices and retailers change with them. Look up the set that is out while you are there, rather than the one we looked at.
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