Lady Gaga teacup fetches $75,300 in benefit auction

Lady Gaga performing during her Monster Ball Tour stop, March 4, 2010, at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, England. Photo by Bobby Charlton of Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, England, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

TOKYO (AFP) – A teacup and saucer used only once by pop diva Lady Gaga has sold for more than 6 million yen ($75,000) at auction, the sale’s organizer said Monday.

With more than 1,300 bids, the weeklong auction closed Sunday with a top offer of 6,011,000 yen, said Yahoo! Japan, which managed the charity event.

Payment was required before the winning bid could be confirmed, it said.

The cup was used by Lady Gaga at a press conference in Tokyo three months after the massive tsunami of March last year inundated a large stretch of coastline.

Lady Gaga told reporters at the time that she would auction the cup, marked with her lipstick and bearing the Japanese message “We pray for Japan” along with the star’s autograph.

All the money raised will be used to help young Japanese artists who want to study in the United States.

The teacup was one of a number of items being sold to raise money for those affected by Japan’s worst postwar calamity, and was the second most expensive lot.

The top-priced item was a Kawai crystal piano used by Yoshiki of rock band Japan X, which went for 11,001,000 yen, Yahoo! Japan said.

The disaster killed some 19,000 people on Japan’s northeast coast and sparked the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, leading to a plunge in visitors to the country.

Lady Gaga visited Japan twice after the disaster and called on tourists from around the world to follow suit.

The songstress is due back in Japan this week as part of an Asian tour.

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