Item Spotlight: The 1997 Princess Mononoke Telephone Card

An unused NTT telephone card from 1997, the year Princess Mononoke was in Japanese theaters. The art is Moro and San, the wolf god and the girl she raised, faces pressed together. 50-unit denomination, never used, graded CGC 10 Gem Mint.

The format

NTT put its first prepaid phone cards into circulation in 1982. Thin magnetic cards you slid into a payphone instead of feeding it coins. Two standard denominations, 50 units and 105 units, a unit being 10 yen of call time. This card carries 500 yen on it. Still. It was never used.

Somewhere along the way, everyone realized the card was a canvas. Studios, magazines, and theaters printed limited runs as promos and premiums, and the teleca became one of the default collectibles of 90s otaku culture. Cheap to make, tied to a moment, gone when the moment passed.

Then everyone bought a mobile phone and the payphone began its slow death. As of March 2022 about 108,000 payphones remained across all of Japan, kept around largely for disasters, since they work in blackouts and get priority when the networks jam.

Here is the part that gets us. NTT still honors these. An unused card can pay down a phone bill through NTT East, 50 yen handling fee per card. A 29-year-old piece of movie merch that is also, technically, money.

The film

Princess Mononoke opened in Japan on July 12, 1997 and broke the national box office record E.T. had held for fifteen years. It stayed the highest-grossing film ever released in Japan until Titanic arrived a few months later.

Miyazaki drew or retouched close to 80,000 of the film's roughly 144,000 cels himself. It was also the first of his films to touch a computer. About five minutes fully digital, another ten with digital ink and paint. Everything else, by hand.

When Miramax took the US rights and Harvey Weinstein pushed for cuts, producer Toshio Suzuki presented him a replica katana at a meeting in New York with a message. Mononoke-hime, no cut. The film ran uncut. Miyazaki stepped away from directing after this one. He came back for Spirited Away. He keeps doing that.

The wolf

Moro is voiced by Akihiro Miwa, and a paragraph is not enough for Akihiro Miwa, but here goes. Chanson singer, actor, author, drag performer, six decades of Japanese counterculture in one person. He took his stage name in 1971 after chanting sutras at Yukio Mishima's memorial service. His 1964 song Yoitomake no Uta, written for working-class mothers, was banned from commercial broadcast for years. Miyazaki cast him twice, as Moro here and as the Witch of the Waste in Howl's Moving Castle. Miwa died in June 2026 at 91.

This card carries his character's face.

The grade

CGC 10 Gem Mint, cert 6020463008. On the CGC scale only Pristine 10 sits above it, and the difference is a single grading criterion under 10x magnification. For a 1997 magnetic card with no protective anything, printed to be shoved into payphones and thrown away, a 10 is not a normal outcome.

Third-party grading of telephone cards barely existed until a few years ago, so slabbed telecas are still thin on the ground. What this one has going for it: film-year Ghibli licensing, a dead format with no new supply, and a grade with nowhere to go up. Most survivors got used, and used shows. Unused, full-value cards are the whole game.

The card is in the archive as the 1997 Princess Mononoke Studio Ghibli Phone Card CGC 10.