Japanese 151 vs English 151: Prices Compared

The 151 set exists in both languages and our own corpus had never compared it card for card, because the two checklists do not line up and the Japanese names are in kana. We did the join and checked it: on 2026-09-23, across the **193 English cards that resolve to a Japanese counterpart**, the English copy is the dearer of the two 152 times, the Japanese copy 31 times, and 10 pairs are quoted at the same cent, at a median Japanese-to-English ratio of 0.74. That single number hides the finding. Split the set into the four tiers its own rarity field records and the ratio climbs straight up the ladder: 0.28 on illustration rares, 0.46 on ultra rares, **1.09 on special illustration rares**. The cheap end of the Japanese set is much cheaper. The top of it is not cheaper at all.

Our catalog carries 725 rows under three set names for one release. 151 is the English set, 207 rows, all priced. ポケモンカード151 is the Japanese checklist, 210 rows from the TCGdex feed, all priced. SV2a: Pokemon Card 151 is 308 rows from the marketplace feed, and it is not the Japanese checklist at all: 153 of its rows are the Master Ball Pattern parallel, 153 are the Poké Ball Pattern parallel, and exactly 2 are plain cards, Mewtwo - 150/165 and Snorlax - 143/165.

Those two are also the only rows that the usual dedupe catches. Deduplicating all 725 rows on the TCGplayer product id collapses **2 rows**, because those two plain marketplace rows share an id with ミュウツー 150 and カビゴン 143. Every other row survives, and it should: they are genuinely different products. The lesson our own catalog notes record, that 1,212 rows across the catalog are the same product twice, is true and is not the problem here. The problem here is that summing both Japanese set names gives $5,179.75, which is the checklist plus two parallel printings of most of it, and reads as if the Japanese set were three times the English one.

Numbers 001 to 151 are the 151 Pokémon the set is named for, and they are in Pokédex order in both languages. We joined them on the printed number and then checked every one by resolving the Japanese kana name through our own species dictionary and comparing it with the English name stripped of its mechanic suffix. **All 151 agree.** That is the check a number join needs, because the very next block shows what happens without it.

Numbers 152 to 165 are the fourteen trainers and tools, and the number join is wrong on **all fourteen**. English orders that block alphabetically, from Antique Dome Fossil to Rigid Band. Japanese orders it by its own syllabary. English 160 is Erika's Invitation and Japanese 160 is たべのこし, which is Leftovers, three slots away. Only four of the fourteen Japanese names resolve through our dictionary at all, so we did not map the rest by hand: the whole block is excluded from every price figure here, and both lists are printed below so a reader can do the mapping we declined to do. It is $2.62 of English ask against $1.40 of Japanese.

Above 165 the numbers diverge for a different reason: Japanese printed three cards English did not. We split each side into its four tiers and joined on the resolved species name inside the tier. The English tiers come from the recorded rarity field; the Japanese rows record no rarity at all, so the Japanese ranges are contiguous number blocks asserted in the script, which fails the run if the two species sets inside a block do not match. They match. The three leftovers are Japanese-only, and one of them is expensive.

The three Japanese-only cards are カビゴン 181, a Snorlax illustration rare at $12.22, ミュウツー 183, a Mewtwo illustration rare at $18.23, and ミュウex 205, a Mew special illustration rare at $208.60 that has no English counterpart at any number. It is also the reason a naive join goes wrong here. English 205 is Mew ex too, but it is the hyper rare at $27.54, and its real twin is ミュウex 208 at $43.21. Match the two Mews by number order instead of by tier and you publish a 7.6x gap that does not exist.

This is the whole result in one table. Every row is the full tier, not a selection, and the rows sum to the 193 matched pairs. The last three columns sum to the pair count on every row: 10 of the 151 Pokémon pairs are quoted at exactly the same cent in both languages, and they are the reason 152 and 31 do not add to 193.

The ten pairs at the bottom of that table, the special illustration rares and hyper rares, are the only place in this set where the Japanese card is routinely the dearer one, and they are the cards the set is actually collected for. Ten pairs is a small sample and we are not going to pretend otherwise, so here is every one of them rather than a chosen few.

Alakazam ex 201 is one of the two English-dearer rows, and it has its own study: see Alakazam ex 151 value for the graded ladder we deliberately do not run here.

153 of the 165 base numbers exist as a Master Ball Pattern parallel and a Poké Ball Pattern parallel in the Japanese print run. The twelve that do not are exactly the twelve ex cards: 003, 006, 009, 024, 038, 040, 065, 076, 115, 124, 145 and 151. Neither parallel has an English counterpart at any number, so both are excluded from every ratio above.

They are also where the money in the Japanese set is. The 153 Master Ball cards ask **$3,531.40** against $27.25 for the same 153 base cards, a median multiple of 93.9 times, and they are dearer than the base print in 153 cases out of 153. Against the English side the comparison is starker still: of the 139 Master Ball cards whose number sits in the verified Pokémon block, **all 139 ask more than the English card at that number**. The whole English set, all 207 cards, asks $1,851.61. One Japanese parallel printing of 153 of them asks nearly twice that.

The last row carries "not comparable" rather than a price because 161 is inside the trainer block where the two checklists disagree, and printing the English card at number 161 there would be printing Giovanni's Charisma beside an Erika's Invitation. The Poké Ball Pattern parallel is the same shape at a twentieth of the level: 153 cards, $139.90 in total, a median 4.2 times the base card, dearest at Gengar (Poke Ball Pattern) for $16.44.

The Japanese price flip measured 1,373 cards across the whole catalog that exist as exactly one English and one Japanese printing, and found the Japanese card dearer under a dollar and much cheaper above $100. Its gate excludes this set almost entirely, because most 151 cards have two or three Japanese printings. The flatter ladder matched eleven set pairs card by card and says so in its own methodology: it **dropped 151** because the exclusion rule left it with two usable rows. This study is the set that piece could not do, joined by number and tier instead of by name.

Both of those read at the catalog level and both would have called this set cheaper in Japanese, which is true of 152 of 193 cards and false of the seven cards that carry 43% of the English set's value. The same card, two oceans apart argued that vintage converges and modern chase art diverges; inside one modern set the divergence runs the other way at the top. And Japanese vs English Pokemon cards documented the two Japanese id namespaces, `jat-` and `ja-`, in the abstract. Here is what they do to one release: they hold different things under two names, and only two rows of 518 collide.

Both legs are asks on one Western marketplace in US dollars, not sales, and not what a card costs inside Japan. We hold no shipping or import cost, so none of the gap is attributed. The fourteen trainers at 152 to 165 are excluded entirely, which removes $2.62 of English ask and $1.40 of Japanese. The Master Ball and Poké Ball parallels are excluded from every ratio because they have no English side. The special illustration rare finding rests on 7 pairs and the hyper rare row on 3; we print both counts rather than a pooled figure because pooling them would hide how thin they are. No graded figure appears in this study at all: the Japanese rows of this set carry sold medians on a different key and a proper ladder belongs in a per-card study, not here.

Rebuild the four tier blocks from the recorded English rarity field, resolve the Japanese names through any Japanese-to-English species map, and take the ratio per tier on any single complete day of the ask tape. If the special illustration rare median comes back below 1.00 while the illustration rare median stays near 0.28, the ladder claim is wrong. If a reader maps the fourteen trainers by hand and the block's median ratio lands outside 0.4 to 0.9, our decision to exclude it mattered more than we say it did.

Population: every `cards` row in the three set names "151", "ポケモンカード151" and "SV2a: Pokemon Card 151" on 2026-09-23, 725 rows. Deduplicating on TCGplayer product id collapses 2 rows, both of them a plain marketplace row sharing an id with its catalog twin (jat-566495 with ja-SV2a-150, jat-566488 with ja-SV2a-143); every other row is a distinct product. Prices are asks from the daily card tape `price_history` on epoch day 20719, 2026-09-23, a complete day carrying 52,378 priced products; the partial days 20704 to 20713 are not used. Population is PRODUCTS, not catalog rows: one row per TCGplayer product id where present, else the catalog id, ties broken to the lexicographically smallest catalog id. Graded figures are SOLD medians from `graded_snapshots`, latest day per card and grade, read across both the catalog-id and the product-id keyspaces and taking the fresher row, then dropping any surviving median dated before day 20695, the first day of the current daily graded tape, and quoted only where the sample is 2 or more. PSA figures are REGISTRY LINES from `population_snapshots`, latest day per key; many products share one line, so no per-set sum of them is printed. Medians are upper-middle on even samples. The set-value series `sethist2:` is not used anywhere in this study, so a /set/ page's own "Full Set" figure will not match these sums: that is two instruments, not an error. JOIN RULES. Numbers 001 to 151: joined on the printed number, then verified by resolving the Japanese name through apps/web/src/server/species-ja-en.json, 1,354 entries, and comparing it with the English name after folding accents, apostrophes, the gender signs and a trailing mechanic token (ex, V, VMAX, VSTAR, GX, Star). 151 of 151 agree; none was dropped. Numbers 152 to 165: EXCLUDED, 14 cards each side, $2.62 of English ask and $1.40 of Japanese, because the two languages order the block differently and only 4 of the 14 Japanese names resolve through the dictionary. Both lists are printed above unmatched; we did not hand-map them. Numbers 166 and up: each side split into four tier blocks, the English ranges taken from the recorded `rarity` field and the Japanese ranges asserted as contiguous number ranges in the script, which throws if the species sets inside a block do not match; then joined on the resolved species name within the block. 42 of 42 English secrets matched, leaving 3 Japanese-only cards, named above. Total 193 matched pairs of 207 English cards. The Master Ball Pattern and Poké Ball Pattern parallels are excluded from every English comparison because they have no English counterpart; their own multiples are taken against the Japanese base card at the same number, and the 139-of-139 figure is restricted to numbers 001 to 151 where the English counterpart is name-verified. No Japanese set has a working page on this site, so Japanese set names here are plain prose while their CARDS are linked normally. There is no set-value series for any Japanese set and the set screen's catalog list filters to English, so both surfaces 404. We probed rather than assumed: on 2026-09-23 we fetched /set/ and /research/set-screen/ for SM-P: Sun & Moon Promos, CoroCoro Promotional Cards, SV2a: Pokemon Card 151, Expansion Pack, Pokemon VS, Split Earth and 金、銀、新世界へ..., and read the title back on each; all 404. One spelling is worse than a 404: `/set/ポケモンカード151` and `/research/set-screen/ポケモンカード151` both return 200 and render the ENGLISH 151 set, because the slug normaliser strips non-ASCII characters and leaves the string "151". Neither is linked from this study. Report: the wrong-set resolve at that spelling is a defect on our side, not a property of the data. Related studies: the Japanese price flip, the flatter ladder, the same card two oceans apart, Japanese vs English Pokemon cards, Alakazam ex 151 value, and the two Japanese censuses beside this one, Japanese promo card prices and vintage Japanese Pokemon card prices.