Every leaver is an arriver's furniture
When you leave Japan you have days to empty an apartment. Shipping a fridge home costs more than the fridge. So you hold a sayonara sale and move a whole life for the price of a few train tickets. It is one of the most reliable rituals in foreign Japan.
When you arrive, you walk into the opposite problem. An unfurnished Japanese flat is genuinely empty. No fridge, no washing machine, often no ceiling light. You need to fill it fast and cheap, the same week the leaver needs to empty theirs.
Same furniture. Opposite dates. The trade is perfect. Today it just dies in a hundred scattered Facebook posts across GaijinPot classifieds, dead group chats, and a dozen city-specific sale groups that nobody arriving has found yet. The Board is one place for all of it.
A churning, four-million-person market
Japan crossed four million foreign residents for the first time, hitting a record 4.12 million at the end of 2025, up 9.5 percent in a year. A population that large and that mobile means people are landing and leaving every single week.
- 01Arriving: an empty flat needs a fridge, washer, bed, table, and lights before night one
- 02Leaving: those four big appliances cannot even go out as oversized trash
- 03The two needs surface in the same wards, the same months, constantly
- 04Right now they almost never find each other in time
List a move-out date. Claim a pickup.
The Board runs on the one thing a generic marketplace ignores: timing. Leavers post around a known move-out date. Arrivers claim against their own move-in week. The handoff happens inside the community.
- 01Leavers list what is going, with photos, a price or free, ward and station, and the move-out date
- 02Arrivers browse by area and by when things free up, then claim an item
- 03The two arrange pickup directly, leaver to arriver, no shipping, no middleman
- 04Listings expire on the move-out date, so the board is never full of ghosts
No shop fronts. No couriers. Just a leaver handing a washing machine to the person moving in three stations away.
Not another Mercari
Mercari and Jimoty are huge and impersonal, and most of them are walls of Japanese. The Board is small on purpose, built around three things a general market cannot copy.
Who this hits Anyone landing in Japan with an empty apartment, and anyone leaving with a full one. Same board, opposite ends.
The most Japanese idea on the site
There is a word for this: もったいない, mottainai, roughly "what a waste." Throwing out a good fridge offends it. So does paying to throw it out. Disposing of the big four appliances is not even free under the Home Appliance Recycling Law: expect a recycling fee around ¥2,400 (about $15) for a washer and ¥4,600 (about $30) for a fridge, plus a collection charge on top. Smaller furniture as oversized trash runs roughly ¥400 to ¥3,000 (about $3 to $20) an item, with a sticker from the konbini.
The Board flips every one of those fees into a handoff. The leaver skips the disposal bill. The arriver skips the store. Nothing useful hits the curb. A circular, secondhand loop that runs itself, owned by the community moving through it.
Leaving for a while? Store it.
Selling everything only pays off if you are gone for good. If you are leaving Japan for a few months, a semester, a work stint, then clearing the whole apartment and re-buying it all when you land back costs far more than putting it away. Storage is the move most people forget.
Our pick is Storage Tokyo. They pick up, store, and bring it back across Tokyo and the wider Kanto area, without the usual friction.
Where the sales live today
The Board is not live yet. Until it ships, a sayonara sale still scatters across a handful of platforms. These are where leavers post and arrivers hunt right now, each with its own quirks.
Facebook sayonara-sale groupsThe default for most foreigners. City-specific groups (Tokyo Sayonara Sales, Osaka, and so on) where leavers post photos and move-out dates, and pickups get arranged in the comments. English-first and the most active of the lot.→
Craigslist TokyoThe old-school English board. Free to post, no app, browse the for-sale and free sections by area. Thin outside the big cities, but dead simple.→
Jimoty (ジモティー)Japan's biggest local classifieds. Mountains of free and cheap furniture for local pickup, mostly in Japanese, strongest for give-aways once you can read a little.→
In development
The Board is a real build, a lightweight list, browse, claim, and expire system on the same server as the rest of JPIF. It ships after the main site goes live. No accounts to create, no fees to anyone, ever.
Want first dibs on the launch list, as a leaver cashing out or an arriver furnishing from zero? Tell us through JPIF and we will put you on the board before it is public.
The Board, in development