The short version
- Three routes cover most secondhand furniture and appliance shopping for foreign residents: Mercari (a nationwide resale app with escrow-style payment protection), Jimoty (free regional classifieds, mostly cash-in-person), and Facebook's "Sayonara Sale" groups (English-speaking, run around the departing-expat community).
- None of the three is fully English-friendly where it matters most. Mercari's app interface added English through 2025, but the messages you exchange with a seller are still overwhelmingly in Japanese.
- Payment protection differs sharply between the three: Mercari holds your payment until the transaction is confirmed; Jimoty and Sayonara Sale groups are typically cash-on-pickup with no platform standing behind the deal at all.
- Jimoty and Sayonara Sale groups tend to win for large, hard-to-ship items like bed frames and refrigerators, since the buyer usually collects in person rather than paying to ship anything.
- Secondhand purchases carry real fraud, no-show, and item-condition risk on any of these platforms — that risk doesn't disappear because a platform is popular, and this guide doesn't overstate how protected you are.
Somewhere between the moving truck leaving and your first grocery run, most new residents in Japan hit the same empty patch of floor where a bed frame or a dresser should go. Buying new is one option, and a monthly rental service is another — both covered in our moving-in checklist. There's a third path that a lot of people hear about secondhand from a coworker or a group chat, then never actually try, because "just use Mercari" doesn't explain which of three very different platforms someone meant.
Three platforms, none of them run by us
Mercari, Jimoty, and the Facebook groups known as Sayonara Sales are three separate, unrelated services. This guide explains how each one generally works and how they compare, but it doesn't host listings, connect buyers with sellers, or take a cut of anything. Every transaction described below happens entirely on someone else's platform, between two people who found each other there — this site is not a party to any of it, and can't vouch for a specific seller, listing, or outcome.
Mercari: the app most people mean by "secondhand in Japan"
Mercari is Japan's largest flea-market app, built around nationwide shipping rather than local pickup. Sellers list an item with photos and a price, buyers pay through the app, and Mercari holds that payment in an escrow-style system until the transaction is confirmed complete — it isn't released to the seller until the buyer rates the transaction or a set number of days pass without a dispute. Mercari also runs a buyer-side protection process for cases where an item never arrives or turns out to be significantly different from the listing.
Language is the part that's improved recently but not solved. Mercari rolled out an English-language app interface in phases through 2025, switchable from the app's settings menu. That covers browsing and checkout; it does not cover the messages you send a seller to ask a question or arrange a return, which are still almost always in Japanese in practice. Signing up also generally needs a Japanese mobile number for SMS verification and a Japanese-issued payment method or bank account, so it isn't a same-day option for someone who just landed.
Jimoty: free, local, and built for things too big to ship
Jimoty is a regional classifieds board, organized by prefecture and city rather than a single nationwide catalog. A large share of its furniture and appliance listings are free or priced low enough that the point isn't profit — the seller mainly wants the item gone before a move. Buyer and seller message inside the app to agree a pickup time and place, then hand the item over in person; there's no in-app payment step at all for most listings, so the platform itself holds nothing in escrow and isn't involved once you've agreed to meet.
That makes Jimoty a strong fit for exactly the items Mercari handles worst: a refrigerator, a sofa, a bed frame. It also means Jimoty carries the plainest version of in-person-trade risk, since there's no payment platform standing between you and a no-show or a disappointing item. Registering generally requires a Japanese phone number, and the site and app are Japanese-only as far as we've found — a translation app is the practical workaround, not an official feature.
Sayonara Sale groups: the English-speaking exit door
"Sayonara Sale" isn't a company or an app — it's the name attached to a cluster of Facebook groups where residents leaving Japan sell or give away what they can't take with them, often in one batch ahead of a fixed flight date. Tokyo Sayonara Sales is the largest and most active of these; regional versions exist for cities like Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. Because the groups are built by and for an English-speaking community, this is the one of the three routes where negotiating in English is the norm rather than a workaround.
The trade-off is that a Facebook group is just a bulletin board with no transaction system attached to it at all — not even Jimoty's in-app messaging. Meetups, payment (almost always cash), and pickup logistics are worked out entirely between two people in the comments or a private message, with no platform mediating any part of it. Departing sellers are also often working against a deadline, which can mean fast, generous pricing, but also a narrow pickup window with little flexibility if your schedule doesn't line up.
Comparing the three at a glance
None of these three wins across every row below. Treat the table as a way to match the platform to what you're actually trying to buy, not as a ranking.
| What matters to you | Mercari | Jimoty | Sayonara Sale groups |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language barrier | App interface available in English since 2025; messages with sellers are usually still in Japanese | Japanese-only interface as far as we've found; a translation app helps but isn't official | Run largely in English, since the audience is the foreign-resident community itself |
| Payment safety | Escrow-style: Mercari holds the payment until the deal is confirmed complete, with a buyer-protection process for disputes | No in-app payment step for most listings; cash or bank transfer handed over directly, nothing held by the platform | Same as Jimoty — a Facebook group is a listing board, not a payment system; nothing is held in escrow |
| Large, bulky items | Built around shipping; oversized furniture usually needs a special shipping option or a rarer local-pickup arrangement | Built for exactly this — most listings assume you collect the item yourself | Also built for pickup, often as part of a one-time bulk giveaway before someone's flight |
| Typical price | Market-priced — anywhere from a few hundred yen to close to retail for a popular brand | Frequently free or a token amount, though listings are negotiable | Often free or heavily discounted, since the seller mainly wants it gone by a fixed date |
| To register or use it | Japanese mobile number for SMS verification, plus a Japanese-issued payment method or bank account | Japanese mobile number to sign up | A Facebook account and the group's own approval — no Japanese phone number needed |
Reading the table for your own situation
If you're mainly buying small or mid-sized items and want some payment protection while you're still new to the country, Mercari is the reasonable default, translation friction and all. If the thing you need is a bed frame, a washing machine, or anything you'd rather not pay to ship, Jimoty or a Sayonara Sale group generally serves you better, since both assume you're collecting in person anyway. And if English-language negotiation matters more to you right now than price or selection, a Sayonara Sale group is the one built around that specifically — though it's also the least structured of the three, so treat any deal there with the same care you'd use meeting a stranger from any online listing.
The risk the comparison table doesn't show
Popularity isn't the same as safety, and it's worth being direct about that. Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center logs thousands of consumer consultations a year tied to flea-market and classifieds services — complaints range from items that don't match their listing to sellers or buyers who go silent after money or goods change hands. A 2026 report in The Japan Times also cited data from Japan's product-safety agency NITE linking a rising number of accidents to used electrical items bought secondhand, alongside growing use of flea-market apps generally. Separately, Japan's major marketplace operators, including Mercari, have begun sharing suspected-fraud account data with police, which points to the problem being taken seriously rather than being rare.
A specific pattern worth knowing: scammers have copied real listings from legitimate marketplaces onto fake storefronts, then asked buyers to pay through a QR code outside the platform's own payment flow. The practical takeaway is simple. On Mercari, only pay through Mercari's own checkout, never a QR code or bank transfer a "seller" sends you directly. On Jimoty and in Sayonara Sale groups, where cash changes hands in person by design, meet in a public place in daylight, inspect or plug in an electrical item before paying, and treat any pressure to decide immediately as a reason to slow down, not speed up.
A few habits that head off most of the friction
Across all three platforms, the same small set of habits comes up repeatedly in the sources behind this guide as the difference between a smooth pickup and a wasted afternoon. Reply promptly once you've expressed interest, since popular free listings on Jimoty and Sayonara Sale groups are frequently claimed within hours. Confirm a specific pickup date and time rather than a vague "sometime this week," and show up when you said you would, or message ahead if something changes. Bring the right cash, in small enough bills that the seller doesn't have to make change on the spot. None of this is unique to Japan, but it matters more here because a missed pickup on a free listing can read as inconsiderate in a way that follows you if you use the same platform again.
What this guide does not cover
This is a general comparison of how three platforms work, not a verification service, a legal opinion, or advice on any specific transaction. It doesn't cover reselling your own belongings for profit as a business, which involves separate licensing questions under Japan's secondhand-dealer rules; nothing here is written for that use case. It also isn't a substitute for reading each platform's own terms of service, which set the actual rules for disputes, fees, and account suspension.
Where this connects
This guide picks up exactly where our moving-in week checklist leaves the furniture question open: that guide compares buying new against short-term rental subscriptions, and this one adds the third option neither of those covers — buying secondhand instead. If a monthly subscription still appeals more than a Mercari search, our comparison of CLAS, airRoom, subsclife, and MUJI's furniture rental terms goes deeper into guarantor, credit card, and cancellation questions than the moving-in checklist does. If you're the one leaving Japan rather than arriving, the same problem runs in reverse. Furniture and large appliances you can't take with you either become a Sayonara Sale listing like the ones described above, or go through the formal sodai gomi and appliance-recycling process covered in our guide to disposing of furniture and appliances before you move out — worth reading before your own move-out date, since giving an item away through one of these platforms is often cheaper and faster than the paid disposal route that guide walks through.
Sources
Checked 2026-08-11.
For Mercari's escrow-style payment holding and buyer-protection process, see Mercari, Inc.'s own description (about.mercari.com). For the English-language app interface rollout, see Mercari's engineering blog (engineering.mercari.com, posted December 2025). For how Jimoty and Sayonara Sale groups generally work, including registration requirements and the cash-on-pickup norm, see Japan Dev (japan-dev.com), Furima Navi (furima-navi.jp), Japan Handbook (japanhandbook.com), Japan Living Life (japanlivinglife.com), GoEMON (goemon-jp.com), and Nishida Service (disposal-japan.com). For consumer-consultation volume and NITE's data on accidents linked to secondhand electrical items, see The Japan Times (japantimes.co.jp). For marketplace operators sharing suspected-fraud data with police, see Japan Today (japantoday.com). If a transaction goes wrong, the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan's English-language page (kokusen.go.jp) is the official starting point for a consultation. Fees, interface languages, and platform policies change over time; confirm current details directly with Mercari, Jimoty, or the specific Facebook group before you rely on anything above.