Buying secondhand goods while traveling in Japan is easy. Selling your own items to the same kind of store can be a different matter.
The reason is that secondhand stores operate as licensed dealers in used goods, and sellers may have to be identified under Japan’s Secondhand Articles Dealer Act. For certain transactions, dealers are required to confirm information such as the seller’s name, address, occupation, and age. There are legal exceptions depending on the value and type of goods, so the law does not require exactly the same identification procedure for every purchase.
However, the minimum legal requirement and a store’s own purchasing rules are not necessarily the same.
Major reuse chains may require identification documents even in cases where the law would allow a simpler procedure. Second Street, for example, requires a valid ID showing the seller’s name, current address, and date of birth for in-store purchases, and a residence card is among the documents it accepts.
This is where a practical difference can appear between short-term tourists and foreign residents of Japan.
A foreign resident may have a residence card or another document accepted by the store. A tourist usually does not. In other words, the problem is not simply that the seller is a foreigner; it is that the identification the tourist has may not satisfy that particular store’s requirements.
BOOKOFF, for example, states that passports issued outside Japan cannot be used as identification when selling items. So a tourist who walks into a store with goods to sell and only a passport from their home country may still be unable to complete the sale.
At the same time, it would be inaccurate to say that tourists are completely prohibited from selling secondhand goods in Japan. Identification requirements can vary by store and by purchasing method. If you want to sell something while traveling, it is better to check in advance whether the store accepts a foreign-issued passport and what it requires for address verification.
In short, buying and selling are not equally simple at a Japanese secondhand store. Buying usually involves only the normal purchase process. Selling can trigger identification requirements designed to make the flow of used goods traceable.
So whether a tourist can sell an item depends less on nationality itself and more on whether the seller can meet the identification requirements of that particular store.
References
- e-Gov Legal Search, “Secondhand Articles Dealer Act” and related regulations
- Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, guidance on identification requirements under the Secondhand Articles Dealer Act
- BOOKOFF, “Can a foreign passport be used as identification?”
- Second Street, “In-Store Selling Guide”
