Kei Truck Japan is an independent guide to buying and importing kei trucks and kei vans (Japanese mini trucks) from Japan, written from Sapporo, Japan by Fuki Narita.
What makes this site different is simple: measured data. Most English-language kei truck guides are written from the United States, where the only visible prices are the ones dealers ask after the truck has already been shipped, landed and marked up. I am on the other side of that transaction. Prices here come from complete counts of Japan’s public vehicle listings — not samples, not estimates — recorded on the date shown so anyone can check the same source and compare.
What has been measured so far
- 394 kei trucks — every 25-year-eligible Carry, Hijet, Acty, Sambar and Minicab publicly listed in Japan, with drivetrain and bed configuration recorded for each.
- 172 kei vans — the complete eligible van market across five badges, cargo and passenger trims separated.
- All 50 US states — registration status checked against statutes, bill numbers and DMV bulletins rather than repeated from other lists.
- 205 members of Japan’s used vehicle export directory, checked by hand against the exporters this site discusses.
Those measurements produce findings you will not read elsewhere, because nobody else counts: that newer, better-equipped kei trucks often list below the older generation in Japan while Americans pay more for them; that the “4WD premium” on one model turned out to be a dump-bed premium hiding inside the average; that a factory supercharger doubles a Sambar’s asking price here. Where my own earlier numbers turned out to be wrong, the correction is written into the page rather than quietly swapped.
How this site makes money
Kei Truck Japan earns referral commissions on some purchases — currently a referral code for CAR FROM JAPAN that gives buyers $100 off and pays this site a reward. Every page carrying a referral link says so at the top. The commercial relationship does not touch the measurements: the counts are complete rather than curated, the tables are dated, competitor products are compared on the same criteria, and where a figure is a company’s own claim that I could not independently confirm, it is labelled self-reported. See the affiliate disclosure for the full terms.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, I want to know — measured claims are only worth anything if they can be checked. Email info@keitruckjapan.com and tell me which figure and where; corrections get made on the page, with a note saying what changed.
— Fuki Narita, Sapporo, Japan