All the Japan Post Pokémon Cards: Two Promos in Twenty-One Years

2 cards

Japan Post has made exactly two Pokémon cards: the Beauty Looking Back Pikachu (227/S-P) and the Moon Geese Cramorant (226/S-P), both illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita and sold together in the Pokémon Stamp Box. The box came out on August 25, 2021, at 4,000 yen, in 100,000 copies sold entirely by lottery, and neither card has been reprinted.

They are the only game cards in twenty-one years of partnership. Since 2005, Japan Post and Pokémon have produced stamps, postboxes and stationery, and the box itself held a sheet of Pokémon stamps whose two largest designs are the artworks of the two cards.

Two cards, and two famous stamps

The box, ポケモン切手BOX～ポケモンカードゲーム 見返り美人・月に雁セット～ (the Pokémon Stamp Box, Beauty Looking Back and Moon and Geese set), came as a Poké Ball box holding a sheet of ten self-adhesive stamps, three die-cut shaped cards (Pikachu, Eevee and Charizard), the two promo cards and the Family Pokémon Card Game, a retail two-deck starter (Cinderace V and Pikachu V) sold on its own since July 9, 2021. The stamps were never sold outside the box.

Cramorant#226/S-PPikachu#227/S-P

Their subject, on the other hand, is instantly readable to a Japanese reader. They restage two of the most famous stamps in the country's modern philately, both issued for Philatelic Week in the late 1940s.

The Cramorant restages 月に雁, "Wild Geese under the Moon", after Hiroshige: three birds descending diagonally across a pale disc. On the card the three geese are three Cramorants, on the same diagonal, under the same moon. The Pikachu restages 見返り美人, "Beauty Looking Back", after Moronobu: a woman in a kimono turning her head over her shoulder, here with Pikachu riding on her back. The Hiroshige is a woodblock print; the Moronobu is a painting in color on silk.

Each card beside the work it restages. Left, Wild Geese Flying under the Full Moon by Hiroshige, the source of the 1949 stamp. Right, Beauty Looking Back by Moronobu, the source of the 1948 stamp. The Hiroshige is a woodblock print, the Moronobu a painting in color on silk. Both public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The attacks quote the artwork too. Cramorant's single attack, さんれんづき, Triple Strike, flips three coins for 60 damage per heads: three flips for three birds. Pikachu's, いれかわる, Trading Places in English, switches it with a Benched Pokémon; the word means changing places rather than turning around, so the echo of the woman looking back is thematic rather than literal.

The box Japan Post had to put in a lottery

The original plan, announced on May 7, 2021, was conventional: 80,000 boxes, pre-orders on the post office's online shop from July 26, and counter sales in 54 post offices, most of them the central office of each prefecture.

On July 21, a month before release, Japan Post changed everything: the run rose to 100,000 and sales moved entirely to a lottery, to avoid crowding. Applications ran online from September 1 to 15, 2021, or by postcard; winners were notified around October 18 and bought their box at the post office they had chosen, between late October and mid-November 2021. Most buyers got the cards two months after the official release date.

Part of the stock followed an even narrower path: 150 boxes went to winners of a postcard ballot, to be bought from August 25 to 30, 2021 at the Pokémon booth of the Japan International Stamp Exhibition in Yokohama, in cash only, on presentation of the winning notice and an identity document.

The story has a sequel. On February 1, 2022, Japan Post opened a second lottery for 7,000 boxes, by postcard until February 12, with delivery by mail, partly because first-round winners had not bought theirs within the purchase period.

Twenty-one years of stamps

The collaboration is hardly short on volume. It simply stayed philatelic.

Two lines of that table matter to a card collector. The 63 yen sheet of July 7, 2021 is themed on the trading card game: nine of its designs are Pokémon cards, from Pikachu to Jirachi, and the tenth is the back of a card. Seven weeks later, the box's own sheet added eight more card designs, Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise among them, and two larger 120 yen stamps drawn for the box: Pikachu as the Beauty Looking Back, and Cramorant under the moon. Japan Post described the two promo cards as matching those two stamps.

So Japan Post has put eighteen card designs on stamps, one of them a card back, and two cards into people's hands, and the two cards are card versions of two of its own stamps.

The 2005 sheet was Japan's first Pokémon stamp issue. Since the box of August 2021, Japan Post has issued no new Pokémon stamps: none from 2022 to 2025, none among the 2026 issues, and none in the 2027 program published so far, as of September 24, 2026. Even Pokémon's 30th anniversary, on February 27, 2026, passed without a postal issue.

What replaced the stamps: postboxes

The partnership did not stop, it changed object. On March 23, 2021, more than three months before the stamps, a regular postbox decorated with Slowpoke, a Slowpoke figure on top, was unveiled outside the Takamatsu Central Post Office, in Kagawa prefecture: the first permanent Pokémon postbox in Japan. It is not an ornament: mail posted in it is collected normally.

On July 7, 2021, the day the greeting stamps came out, three more appeared in Yokohama, the first in eastern Japan: two Poké Ball postboxes topped with Pikachu and Eevee outside the city hall, and one topped with Piplup outside the Sakuragi post office. Planned for a year, they have been extended twice and are due to stay until June 30, 2027 (our guide to Pokémon in Tokyo covers them with the rest of Yokohama). A fifth, a special postbox inside the Yokohama Port post office, gave the mail posted in it a Pokémon special postmark from July 7, 2021 until it closed, as planned, on June 30, 2022.

Stationery came and went too. In 2013, a Pokémon pen-pal kit, run with Japan Post's youth pen-friend club, connected schoolchildren from the Tōhoku disaster areas with children elsewhere in the country.

Japan Post is not the only postal service to have printed Pokémon: Australia Post issued stamp packs in May and November 2021 and in September 2023, and France's La Poste issued stamps for Pokémon Day in February 2024 and a booklet that June. None of those packs held a game card, which leaves the two from August 2021 on their own.

Buying the two cards today

Neither card has been reprinted, so every copy comes from the 2021 box, and both trade loose, graded and still sealed in the box. A sealed box keeps what the loose cards lose: the stamp sheet, never sold on its own, the three shaped cards and the family card game.

Loose, the cards carry no postal mark: the number (226/S-P or 227/S-P), the Mitsuhiro Arita credit and the regulation mark E are what identify them. Before buying a loose copy, compare it with a known genuine one, as our guide to spotting fake Pokémon cards explains; a copy graded by a major grading company was authenticated by it, but check the label against the grader's online record, since fake slabs exist. From outside Japan, a proxy service can buy one for you, as our guide to buying Japanese cards from abroad explains.

In total: a twenty-one-year partnership, five postboxes, and two cards released on a single day. Counting the stamps takes care, since the two 2011 sheets shared Pokémon with Astro Boy, Doraemon, Hello Kitty and a detail of the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga animal scrolls: each issue's thirty million stamps include six million Pokémon stamps. And the two cards, with no postal mark at all, are postal through and through: card versions of two stamps from their own box, which quote a print and a painting that Japan's postal service had put on stamps more than seventy years earlier.

FAQ

How many Pokémon cards has Japan Post made?

Two: Cramorant 226/S-P and Pikachu 227/S-P, both by Mitsuhiro Arita, sold together in the Pokémon Stamp Box released on August 25, 2021. Japan Post has made no other game card.

What is the Beauty Looking Back Pikachu?

Pikachu 227/S-P, one of the two cards of the 2021 Pokémon Stamp Box. Its art restages Moronobu's Beauty Looking Back, the painting on Japan's famous 1948 stamp, with Pikachu riding on the woman's back.

How was the Pokémon Stamp Box sold?

Entirely by lottery: 100,000 boxes at 4,000 yen, officially released on August 25, 2021, with most winners buying theirs at a post office from late October 2021. A second lottery of 7,000 boxes followed in February 2022.

Can you buy Pokémon cards at a Japanese post office?

Not as of September 24, 2026. The only Pokémon cards Japan Post has made came in the 2021 Stamp Box, which is no longer on sale, and the Pokémon listings of the post office's online shop are goods such as tableware and golf accessories, not cards.

More Japanese promo series: ANA, JR railway cards, Toyota and, for a trip to Japan, Pokémon in Tokyo.