Card Shops In Japan: Mint Odawara

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.

Odawara is a city in Kanto located southwest of Tokyo.  It's nestled between the Hakone Mountains on the one side and Sagami Bay on the other.  Since the shinkansen stops here it's a convenient gateway for tourists to go to the National Park that Mount Fuji is in.

Lower on the city's list of attractions in the Mint Odawara store,  conveniently located just a few blocks east of Odawara Station (and not far from Odawara Castle).  The store is on the third floor of the EPO shopping mall: UPDATE 10/8/2023 - Store moved as of August of 2023.  The store is now located on the second floor of the Odawara Ekimae Building which is a lot closer to Odawara Station than its old location.  The map at the bottom of this post has been updated for the new location. 

This is another store that's quite good for set building.  They had a fairly diverse selection of singles from older sets (at least from BBM) and their single prices are around 40 to 50 yen.  I do want to point out that their singles are organized by team rather than card number which can be a bit confusing (but is probably much easier for the store to maintain).

Ryan has spent this past summer working just a few blocks from this store and so has visited it quite often.   His comment about the store was that "they have a slightly different selection of cards from other shops, so I've found things as I've shown up. They won't have much newer product, as far as I can tell, and it seems that gaming cards and US products are their biggest sellers now."  I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to their US products but I will mention that this was the only card shop that I saw that had the 2018 Konami Baseball Collection cards.  I didn't see any older (pre-1991) cards here although I wasn't really looking for them.

The store itself was set up pretty well.  It has plenty of room and has a table that two people (like myself and Ryan) can comfortably sit at to go through boxes of cards.  I won't claim it was well organized - it took a little looking to figure out which boxes I wanted to go through and I had to ask (ok, I had to have Ryan ask) the shopkeeper for some help in tracking down where the box of singles for BBM's Real Venus sets were.  That said the shopkeeper was very friendly and helpful.

Here's a couple photos of the shop.  For some reason I only took photos of the outside of it:

The jigsaw puzzles are apparently part of the store as well.

I really liked this store.  I would have spent longer there but I needed to catch a train to Nagoya that day and I was only able to spend about 45 minutes in the store.  I'm not sure it'd be worth the trip if you were just staying in Tokyo (it's about a 30 minute trip on the Shinkansen or 60 to 90 minutes via non-bullet train) but it's very convenient if you're heading from Tokyo to Kyoto, Osaka and/or other points west.

Here's a map showing the location of the shop's location: