If you've never seen one before, a Japanese auction sheet looks like a wall of symbols and abbreviations. But once you know what you're looking at, it tells you more about a car's real condition than any listing photo ever could — which is exactly why every purchase we make starts here.

At the top of the sheet is a single letter or number — the auction house's overall condition grade:

We generally source in the 4 to 6 range unless a client specifically asks otherwise — and if a lower grade ever comes up as an option, your manager will walk you through exactly what that grade means for that particular car before you consider bidding.

Below the grade sits a simple line drawing of the car from above, with short codes marked around the body:

None of these automatically disqualify a car — a 15-year-old JDM classic with a couple of small "A" marks is completely normal. What matters is whether the marks add up to something structural, or whether they're purely cosmetic history.

A separate letter grades the interior and exterior condition:

This matters more than people expect, especially for cars that will spend years as a daily driver rather than a garage piece.

We don't just glance at the headline grade and place a bid. Every sheet we review gets translated in full — through AI translation plus a manager's read — and if anything in the diagram or the notes raises a question, we flag it before you decide whether to bid. When we send you a car for approval, you're seeing our read of the same sheet, in plain language, alongside the option to open the full sheet yourself.

If you ever want to see a real auction sheet we've pulled for a client, ask your manager — we're happy to walk through one together.

We asked one of our Ireland-based clients, Aoife, to walk us through what the process actually looked like from her side — financing, paperwork, and the months between placing a deposit and seeing the car in her own driveway. Here's her account, lightly edited for length.

Some auction mornings are routine. This one wasn't.

A client came to us with a fairly specific brief: a late-90s Skyline, manual transmission, ideally unmodified, and — this was the hard part — with real service history rather than just an auction grade to go on. Cars matching that spec do come up, but usually one part of the brief gives.

A few weeks into watching the lots, one came up at a Nagoya auction house: a 1998 model, grade 4.5, with an unusually complete maintenance folder scanned into the listing — something you see occasionally with cars that spent their life with one careful owner rather than passing through dealers.

The auction sheet showed a single small scratch mark near the rear bumper — the kind that's almost expected on a car this age — and nothing in the diagram suggesting prior repair work. Interior grade came back B: minor wear, nothing that pointed to careless use.

We checked recent statistics for comparable grade-4.5 examples and agreed on a maximum with the client the night before, with a bit of room built in given how rarely the service history came up as a factor. The auction moved fast, as these lots usually do — but we came in under the ceiling, and the win was confirmed as an Auction Price bid, with shipping and commission added afterward.

From there it was the usual path, just with extra care given the car's condition: export and customs procedures in Japan, then the wait for the next available vessel — typically two to four weeks before departure, and around three months in total to reach a European port. Updates went out at each real milestone rather than just at pickup and delivery. The maintenance folder was scanned in full and sent along with the export documents, so the client would have it as part of the car's history going forward, not just a footnote from the listing.

It landed with the client roughly three months after the winning bid — still wearing its factory exhaust, still on its original clutch, with a folder of service records now considerably thicker than the day we found it.

Grade and photos tell you condition. They rarely tell you the story of how a car was cared for. When a sheet like this comes up, it's worth slowing down rather than moving straight to the next lot.