BLOG: Member of Tokyo Ivory Arts and Crafts Cooperative Association arrested for allegedly being involved in illegal ivory exports

• 06/06/2025
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On June 2, 2025, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD) arrested the executives of Daigo Ivory, Ltd. (Saitama Prefecture). Daigo Ivory Store is a member of the Tokyo Ivory Arts and Crafts Cooperative Association (21 companies).

The charges for the arrest were falsely representing cut pieces (divided/cut tusks) or scraps of elephant ivory as mammoth ivory (violation of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act) and violating the compliance requirements imposed on registered businesses engaged in ivory trade (“special international species business”) (violation of the Act on Conservation of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora / ACES).

The direct charge is a violation of the domestic law regarding the sale of elephant ivory, but the larger questions that this case raises go beyond that.

Daigo Ivory also sold ivory products on its own website, but the company listed a particularly large number of suspected elephant ivory items and mammoth tusks on Yahoo! Japan Auctions. LINE Yahoo, which operates one of Japan’s largest e-commerce platforms, voluntarily banned the sale of ivory on its platform from November 1, 2019. However, according to a recent survey of Yahoo! Japan Auctions’ winning bids, conducted by JTEF, the bids for products believed to have been sold by Daigo Ivory over a three-year period (July 2021 to June 2024) exceeded 116 million yen for items suspected to be made from ivory (items advertised as similar materials such as “ivory-like,” and items advertised as “natural materials” with the addition of argot), and the winning bids for mammoth tusks also exceeded 100 million yen.

The ivory confiscated by the TMPD for this case was only a small amount of cut pieces and scraps of ivory that Daigo Ivory has been selling recently. Who purchased the majority of the remaining ivory, and for what purpose?

In 2022, JTEF used a case law search on the Chinese government website to identify 45 cases of illegal ivory exports from Japan to China that had been tried in Chinese criminal courts, two of which involved Daigo Ivory. In one of the cases, in April 2011, a Chinese defendant found out that the Daigo Ivory was handling a large amount of ivory, hippopotamus tusk and other scraps, and made direct contact with the company’s owner to make a contract to buy the scraps at 100,000 yen per month regardless of weight, and over the next three months, purchased 125,786.82g of ivory scraps and 348g of hippopotamus tusk scraps. These were sent from Japan to China using EMS (Express Mail Service).

In addition to these cases, it is difficult to imagine that there is a large demand for cut pieces and scraps in Japan. So, it is suspected that many of the recently purchased ivory items from Daigo via Yahoo! Auction ended up leaving the country illegally.

Japan’s contribution to the illegal international trade in elephants is shown in data from CITES’s Elephant Trade Information System. In the 10 years before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (2010-2019), Japan was involved in a total of 257 ivory seizures, with a total weight of 3.3 tonnes of seized ivory. Much of this seized ivory was illegally exported from Japan and seized in other countries.

The Daigo Ivory case strongly suggests once again that Japan’s domestic ivory market is a hotbed of illegal ivory for export.

But that’s not all.

The government continues to insist that the CITES resolution on closure of the domestic ivory markets “does not call for the closure of Japan’s domestic ivory market, which is strictly controlled.” The key to that management system is the “Public-Private Council for Promoting Appropriate Ivory Trade,” whose secretariat is comprised of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of the Environment, the Japan Federation of Ivory Arts and Crafts Associations, and LINE Yahoo!.

This criminal incident was committed by a member of the Tokyo Ivory Arts and Crafts Cooperative Association, which is part of the Japan Federation of Ivory Arts and Crafts Associations, together with the Osaka association, and abusing the LINE Yahoo e-commerce platform. This was a crime committed behind the scenes by those who were supposed to be at the heart of “strict management” in the public eye. This has made it clear that Japan’s “strictly controlled domestic ivory market” is only in name. According to media reports, the arrested former President the Daigo Ivory told TMPD that he “thought the crime was just a case of littering a cigarette, and didn’t think the police would get involved.”

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) banned international commercial trade in ivory in 1989, and the ban came into effect the following year in 1990. However, legal domestic markets remained in major ivory consumer countries, allowing consumers to still freely purchase ivory. As a result, smuggling of ivory to meet this demand continued. In response, CITES CoP17, held in 2016, amended its resolution on trade in elephants to recommend that countries with legal domestic ivory markets that contribute to elephant poaching or illegal ivory trade shall

urgently close their domestic markets in which ivory is sold, with narrow exceptions for some items.

Now is the time for the Japanese government to comply with CITES resolutions by banning the domestic sale of elephant ivory and closing the market. The ACES is currently undergoing a review by the Ministry of Environment – during this process, the market for ivory should be closed with limited exceptions.