BODY: "What's actually so bad about reselling? Honestly, I just can't see eye to eye with the critics. You're filling the gap between supply and demand—that's a perfectly respectable economic activity."
That was entrepreneur Takafumi Horie ("Horiemon") on X, October 29, 2025, restating a defense that Japan's tenbaiya—scalpers—have long leaned on: without us, the economy wouldn't turn. Mercari, the country's dominant flea-market app, has just spent a year testing that claim to destruction.
The turning point came with the Nintendo Switch 2. Facing a flood of listings priced far above retail, Mercari rolled out purchase-limit warnings, listing restrictions, and beefed-up fraud detection aimed squarely at bulk resellers. The measures escalated through 2025 and reached full pitch with "Chiikawa," the wildly popular character franchise whose random-blind-box goods had become a scalper's playground.
The conventional wisdom said cracking down would gut Mercari's transaction volume—scalpers, after all, are heavy, high-value users. Instead, the company reported double-digit growth even as it tightened the screws. The takeaway is blunt: curbing resale didn't shrink the marketplace. Ordinary buyers and sellers more than filled the space the scalpers vacated.
That result reframes the whole debate. If a platform can throttle its most aggressive resellers and still grow, the "we keep commerce alive" argument loses its economic footing—and starts to look more like a rationalization for cornering scarce goods.
The insider take
In Tokyo, tenbaiya have become a genuine cultural flashpoint, not just a pricing gripe. Limited-run character goods, concert merch, and console launches are emotional purchases for Japanese fans, and seeing them hoarded and flipped feels like a violation of fair play—a value that runs deep here. Mercari, once blamed for enabling exactly this, has read the room: aligning with fans is now better business than protecting its biggest whales. Horiemon's free-market framing plays well with a slice of X, but on the ground, "reseller" has become close to a slur.
Originally reported by はてなブックマーク (Japanese).