Japan Vehicle Data
Japanese-language primary sources, aggregated for buyers outside Japan

What Japan Actually Sells Used Cars For, By Country — Reading the Trade Statistics Yourself

Published 2026-07-31

Your exporter knows what cars leave Japan for your country and what they average. You don’t. That gap is worth money to them.

But Japan’s Ministry of Finance publishes it. Every month, by destination country, with both value and unit count — which means you can compute the average FOB price per vehicle for any country Japan exports to, for free, without asking anyone’s permission.

This is the export-side companion to the USS auction index, which covers the domestic wholesale market. Same principle: the data exists, it’s public, it’s in Japanese, and English-language coverage doesn’t use it.

Fair warning: there are four ways to get this wrong, and three of them produce a confident, plausible, incorrect number. §3 is the important section.

1. The method

Step 1 — Find the “used” statistical codes

Japanese trade statistics are compiled at 9-digit statistical code level. The first six digits are the international HS code; digits 7–9 are Japanese national subdivisions, and they differ between exports and imports.

HS 8703 is passenger vehicles — but that’s the 6-digit level, which mixes new and used. You need the subdivisions marked 中古のもの (“used”).

Open the export statistical schedule for Chapter 87 (customs.go.jp/yusyutu/2019/data/j_87.htm) and find every 9-digit code under 8703 flagged as used.

If you want all used vehicles, not just passenger cars, add:

Japanese industry practice is to treat 8702 + 8703 + 8704 together as “used vehicles.”

Step 2 — Query by country

Go to the general trade statistics search (customs.go.jp/toukei/search/futsu1.htm) and choose:

「9桁の統計品目番号での検索（実績のある全ての国一覧）」 Search by 9-digit code — list of all countries with activity

For a single country, use the 「一つの国のみ」 variant instead.

A period trick worth knowing: the “single year-month” cumulative column runs from January of that year. Query December and the cumulative column gives you the full year.

Step 3 — Compute the average

Results give value and quantity. Watch the units: value is in ¥1,000; quantity is in units (台 / NO).

Average FOB per vehicle (¥) = value (¥1,000) × 1,000 ÷ quantity (units)

Where you have summed several subdivisions, use a weighted average — total value ÷ total units — not the average of the sub-averages.

Step 4 — For time series, use e-Stat

For bulk work, download CSVs from e-Stat’s 品別国別表 (commodity-by-country tables) rather than paging the search interface. One gotcha: in CSVs from 2009 onward, country code 100 is Japan-flagged data, not a destination.

(The third-party site jtrade.info is easier to use and has Excel export, but publishes value only, no quantity — so it cannot produce a unit price. Use the official search or e-Stat.)

2. What the data currently shows

Japan’s used vehicle exports, for scale:

UnitsNote
2025 full year1,708,604 (+9.1%)Third consecutive record year
2026 Jan–May695,371 (+2.5%)
2026 May137,750 (−4.5% YoY)

Export value has risen faster than volume: approximately ¥434bn (2021) → ¥730bn (2022) → ¥875bn (2023) → ¥1,007bn (2024) — crossing ¥1 trillion for the first time.

Destination shifts you can see before anyone tells you

DestinationThenNow
UAE252,637 in 2025 — the #1 destination two years running283 in May 2026. Outside the top 40
Russia—18,257 in May 2026, #1 for a third consecutive month. Jan–May 84,328, +127.8%, 13.3% of all Japanese used vehicle exports
Tanzania—14,495 in May 2026, +70.5% year on year
South Africa—8,187 in April 2026

The UAE collapse is the kind of thing this data catches immediately. From the top destination to functionally zero, attributed to the Strait of Hormuz situation. An exporter telling you “the market is strong” in mid-2026 is describing a market that has violently reorganised — total volume held up because demand relocated, not because nothing happened.

3. The four traps

Trap 1 — The “used” subdivisions only exist from April 2001. Japan created separate used-vehicle statistical codes in April 2001. Before that you cannot separate used from new. Any “Japan’s used car exports since 1995” series is doing something other than reading this data.

Trap 2 — The subdivisions changed in 2017 and 2021. In 2017, separate codes were added for buses and for passenger hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EVs. In 2021, truck hybrids and EVs were added. Before those dates, those vehicles were sitting inside the petrol or “other” codes. A code-level time series across those years compares different things. Summing to the 8702/8703/8704 level is safer than tracking one subdivision.

Trap 3 — Export values are FOB. Free On Board: the car loaded onto the vessel in Japan. It excludes ocean freight, insurance and everything at your end. Comparing a FOB average against a CIF quote from an exporter is comparing two different numbers — and mistaking one for the other is exactly the error that generates surprise second invoices.

Trap 4 — Don’t mix unit counts from different sources. The widely-quoted 1,708,604 units for 2025 comes from JUMVEA, which counts vehicles valued at ¥200,000 and above. The value figures come from Ministry of Finance trade statistics, which count everything.

Dividing one by the other gives you a wrong average. If you want an average price, take both value and quantity from the trade statistics query, for the same codes and the same period. It’s the whole reason the query returns both.

4. What to do with it as a buyer

Benchmark your destination. Pull the average FOB per unit for your country and compare it against what you’re being quoted, remembering it’s an all-vehicle-types average — kei cars and luxury SUVs in one number. It won’t price your car. It will tell you whether the quote sits in a plausible universe.

Check claims against data. “Prices are up because of African demand” is checkable in about ten minutes.

Understand who you’re bidding against. Which brings us to the finding worth the most.

The Russia effect on small-displacement cars

Japan’s sanctions on exports to Russia prohibit vehicles over 1,900cc, all hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EVs regardless of displacement, and passenger cars over ¥6 million. Russia, meanwhile, imposes no age restriction on imports.

Now put that together with Russia being 13.3% of Japan’s used vehicle export volume in early 2026, at #1.

That demand is concentrated, by law, on old, non-hybrid vehicles of 1,900cc or less.

Which is a precise description of kei cars and small petrol compacts — including the Suzuki Jimny JB23, at 658cc, with no year limit to exclude it.

So if you are bidding on a JB23, you are competing with the largest single destination for Japanese used vehicles, buying in the exact segment the sanctions ceiling pushed it into. That is a structural price pressure on the segment, and it is not mentioned in any English JB23 buying guide we have seen. Our JB23 analysis covers what to inspect; this covers why the price is what it is.

Conversely: JDM performance cars are mostly out of Russia’s reach. An S15 (1,998cc), a JZX100 (2.5L), an Evo VII (2.0L), a DC5 (1,998cc) all exceed 1,900cc. That competition doesn’t touch them.

(Note that Russian-flagged volumes should be read with some care — third-country routing via Mongolia and the UAE is discussed in Japanese industry commentary, so destination figures may not perfectly reflect final destination.)

5. Checklist

Method and limits

Sources. Japan Customs trade statistics search and guidance pages, the export statistical schedule for Chapter 87, e-Stat commodity-by-country tables, JUMVEA export statistics, Japanese industry reporting of monthly export figures, and Japanese analysis of used vehicle export market structure. Collected 2026-07-31.

Limits:

Sources