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The story
A thread on 5ch kicked off with the post “No joke, what’s actually wrong with reselling?” and quickly caught fire. Reselling itself isn’t illegal in Japan as a rule — regulation is limited to specific items like concert and sports tickets. Even so, the backlash of “I just don’t like it” and “it’s a breach of manners” remains strong. The thread saw a head-on clash between the self-responsibility camp (if you want it, get in line and buy it) and critics who argued that resellers buying up stock keeps products from reaching the customers they were meant for. Citing differences from secondhand shops, the mask shortage during the pandemic, and real examples from trading cards, the discussion expanded to cover supply and demand, and even whether companies gain or lose.
What people said
If you can't manage that, or if you factor in the cost of transportation, paying a bit extra is nothing to complain about.
Though personally, I still hate it as a human being.
This. It's not about right or wrong — people just hate it because it's a nuisance.
The US is actually much stricter. In places like California and Iowa, you can get arrested for it, no big deal.
Having to twist yourself into such an absurd, off-base defense just shows you already know reselling is something to feel guilty about.
It's about supply volume as much as price. Manufacturers just need to mass-produce ahead of demand. Resellers might still buy it all up, but if goods are flooding the market, resale prices drop too.
That's fine if you're only thinking about short-term profit, but if you actually want people to use the product and keep buying more down the line, it's not that simple.
You: "So thirsty… finally found a vending machine… gonna buy a ¥120 water and drink it…"
Me: "Not so fast lol. I'm buying up all the water lol. I'll sell it to you for ¥1000 lol. You can afford it if you really want it, right? lol"
That's basically what this is.
If you want it, wait in line until it's restocked and buy it then.
That's just how business fundamentally works for everyone. There's no such thing as goodness in it — resellers just make that fact visible.
It's a self-contained cycle.
That's a cycle isolated from society, though.
Manufacturers and retailers only lose out from it, so nothing about it is "self-contained."
That alone is reason enough to be against it.
How so? Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers all sell like crazy because of it.
Seems like a win for them, no?
So the product doesn't reach the consumers who actually want it directly, but it's fine because resellers buy it instead?
If that's really true, then the optimal move for a company would be to force employees into predatory in-house sales and then resell that same stock through their own shell reseller — is that okay with you?
Are there already big companies doing this, by any chance?
Say a reseller buys 100 units but actually only manages to resell 50 — they'll stop buying next time. The manufacturer, unaware of that, will try to make even more than 100 units for the next run. The right quantity becomes impossible to gauge, and in the end the manufacturer loses out — that's the mechanism.
I'd think manufacturers would also be troubled if their product never reaches the consumers who genuinely need it.
If you really need something, you'd make the effort to buy it, right?
That's exactly why you people end up unable to even afford a Mercedes.
No, if resellers weren't getting in the way, you shouldn't need to make any special "effort" to buy it in the first place.
Even without reselling, buying a popular product takes effort — an extreme example would be New Year's first sales (hatsuuri).
If it wasn't rare to begin with, most people wouldn't even glance at it. Nobody wanted the early-run Pokémon cards back in the day.
Before the resale ban, you could get masks if you were willing to pay.
Once it was banned, they became hard to get no matter what.
There is such a thing as "good" reselling.
All I can think is: how could you bring yourself to buy masks that might've been stored who-knows-where, who-knows-how-dirty? I can't imagine people just looking to make easy pocket change actually handling stock hygiene properly.
What was selling back then was individually wrapped masks, though.
This is all the anti-resale crowd ever has to say. They're making money off it, so their storage is probably way cleaner than these guys' own rooms.
There is. Some card shops these days open up the packs they've stocked and sell the rare cards inside at a markup.
That's a niche practice, and it's not new — it's been around forever.
There are people willing to pay top dollar for expensive cards, so it's not really a bad thing.
A 10% fee is cheaper than tax, right?
They're SOLD for huge amounts, but isn't this basically resellers playing Liar Game with each other (rigging fake sales among themselves)?
Oh, so it's a gift-tax workaround?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Laws regulating reselling itself in Japan are limited in scope, applying only to specific items such as those covered by the 2019 Act on Prohibition of Unfair Resale of Tickets. An individual reselling ordinary goods is, in principle, legal as long as the items aren’t stolen or counterfeit — the main requirement is that anyone running a continuous secondhand-goods business needs a secondhand dealer’s license (kobutsusho license). In other words, the “is it illegal?” question and the “is it acceptable manners?” question that split the thread are actually separate issues, and most of the emotional backlash stems from the latter.
During the pandemic-era mask shortage, mask reselling was temporarily banned in 2020 under the Act on Emergency Measures for the Stabilization of National Livelihood — government intervention like this only happens when a supply shortage becomes a full-blown social problem. Both claims raised in the thread — that “the market still functions fine even with resellers involved” and that “manufacturers and official sales channels only lose out” — capture only part of the picture; the real impact depends on the nature of the product and its supply chain. Readers can easily be misled into assuming reselling equals automatic illegality, but the reality is far more limited.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nanimo Jikkyo G) thread “No joke, what’s actually wrong with reselling?“
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