Card Shops In Japan: Mint Ikebukuro

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

After Ryan and I visited Coletre we next headed to Mint Ikebukuro which is located just about five blocks to the south along the same street.

Somehow I had forgotten to take a picture of the outside of the store when we got there so I'm sharing a photo I took the first time I went there back in 2013:

There are actually two separate Mint stores at this location.  The first floor store shown above sells mostly soccer and idol cards.  I've looked around here a little but never really seen anything I was interested in.

There's a doorway into the building itself to the left of the first floor store that leads to a staircase and elevator.  If you go up to the second floor you'll find the other Mint store which has a wide variety of baseball cards.

This is one of my favorite baseball card stores in Japan.  They carry a lot of singles from sets going back to the 1990's so it's a great place to do set building.  The singles for each set are more or less in order by card number which makes it very easy to find cards.  They also carry a selection of older menkos and Calbees.

When I was there with Ryan I picked up a number of singles for the 1998 BBM set and the 2003-06 BBM Rookie Edition sets.  I also bought some Epoch Rookies & Stars singles from 2018 and 2019 along with several 2018 Epoch One cards and a 1977 Calbee card with Shigeo Nagashima and Masaichi Kaneda.  I spent a total of 7340 yen.  I came back a couple weeks later and bought some 1996, 1997 and 2000 BBM singles for another 2760 yen.  I paid cash both times but the store does take credit cards.

The store is very well organized and it's pretty easy to find things.  It has been remodeled since my first visit in 2013 and it seems a bit roomier now.

The black shelving unit in the center of the room holds the singles for the Japanese baseball card sets.  The other white shelving unit holds boxes and packs (on the side facing the cash register) and complete sets.  The boxes in the shelf to the right of the Ichiro jersey hold MLB cards (I think).  The display case on the wall to the left of the jersey holds hits - autographs, memorabilia cards and rare parallels.

There's a glass cabinet on the wall on the right of the cash register that contains the vintage cards.  You can see the menkos and bromides in this photo and I'm pretty sure this was where the old Calbees and the Epoch One cards were as well.

I want to mention that there's also a gaming card store on the second floor of this building just across the hall from the Mint store.  I thought this was once another Mint store but I'm not sure that's true.

Here's a map showing the first floor store.  If you're coming directly from Ikebukuro Station you'll want to leave the station via the East Exit and head down Green-Odori, following the signs to the Sunshine 60 building.  The directions will tell you to make a left turn and head towards the elevated expressway in the distance.  When you see the ABC Mart building on your right, turn right and walk down about half a block - you'll see the store on your left.

UPDATE - I visited this store again on my 2024 trip and this time I got a good photo of the outside of the building:

In this photo, you can see the doorway into the building to the left of the first floor store.  That's where the staircase to the second floor is.  The door way to the second floor shop looks pretty much the same as it did in 2019:

I was really focused on trying to find some items from my want list when I was here and was kind of disappointed that they didn't have much.  I will say that that was more of an issue with my want list rather than any change in the store's inventory from past visits.  I'm sure if I'd been trying to complete a BBM flagship set from 20 years ago, I'd have had no issues finding cards I needed.  The side effect of my myopia though is I may have missed interesting stuff in the store.

The big change I noticed in the store is there's a set of binders of old Calbee cards on a shelf next to where the Marlins jersey of Ichiro used to be (which has been replaced with a Nolan Ryan jersey):

There's a few more racks containing boxes of cards in different spots around the shop than there used to be.  I didn't look carefully at the display case with the vintage cards this trip so I can't say what was in there now.

The staff at the store was very helpful in trying to locate cards.  There was an American named Nick working there who was particularly helpful since he could talk to me in English and the rest of the staff in Japanese.  I can't say enough about how much they tried to help me but the store simply didn't stock the mid-00's BBM team set singles I was mostly looking for.  I ended up just buying a handful of mid-70's Calbees that I found in the binders.