Chiba-prefecture is located just east of Tokyo and occupies the space between the east side of Tokyo Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Many tourists coming to Japan visit the prefecture without perhaps realizing it - Narita Airport is located here. Chiba-city is the capital of the prefecture and is best known to baseball fans as the home of the Chiba Lotte Marines. But it is also home to another Mint store, called Mint Chiba of course.
Mint Chiba is located on the third floor of the BEE-ONE Mall just a short walk east of Chiba Station. I think the Mall is just part of a larger building. To get to the Mall you want to go into the main, obvious entrance (the one with the canopy over it) for the building on what Google refers to as "Chiba Station Odori Avenue". I mention this so that you can avoid the mistake Dan and I made. We went into the building through a doorway on the back side of it and took the elevator up to the third floor. We were greeted by a featureless corridor with grey doors which actually reminded me of the Mint Hakata location. We wandered around a little bit but didn't see anything that looked like a shop. We eventually realized that we were pretty much in an office building rather than the Mall and we took the elevator back down to the ground floor and walked out the front door of the building. Immediately to our right we saw the aforementioned entrance with the canopy and we both agreed that that was much more likely to be what we were looking for. And sure enough we were greeted with the sight of the shop as we got off the escalator on the third floor:
That's Dan beckoning in the photo.
As for the store itself, it was...OK. It's a mall store and I had set my expectations accordingly. It carried a lot of recent stuff, including boxes, packs, hits and singles. As you would expect for a store in Chiba they appeared to heavily emphasize the Marines. I found a box of singles from Marines team issued sets and spent most of my time there going through it, picking out a handful of cards. I also went through their singles from the recently released Epoch NPB set, looking for the 11 cards I needed for the set that Mint Urawa had not been able to include in the set they sold me. I was able to find 10 of them here. Dan went through the singles here looking for Korean NPB players (especially Lee Seung-Yuop who had spent two seasons with the Marines in 2004-05) but I'm not sure he bought anything here.
Here's a photo of the inside of the shop (which also includes Dan):
It's not a bad shop but I wouldn't recommend going out of your way for it. And it is out of your way - it's about a 40 minute train ride from Tokyo Station to get to Chiba Station. It's also not all that convenient to the Marines - the ballpark is six miles away which works out to about a 40 minute trip via the Chiba Monorial and JR Keiyo lines (although about half of that's the walk to the ballpark from the Kaihimmakuhari Station). But if you're in the Chiba Station area for some other reason it's worth stopping by.
Here's a map showing the location of the store:
2 comments:
As you say, Mint Chiba is not usually worth going out of your way to visit just for the sake of visiting. And the reason it's so far from Zozo Marine Stadium is that the stadium itself is a good bit west of Chiba's downtown. That said, if you're heading to the stadium and want to visit this shop, it's not impossible to go from Chiba to the stadium.
And on that note, a lot of people walk from Kaihim-makuhari Station (about 10-15 minutes), but there is a shuttle bus from that station, and another that serves Makuhari-hongo Station on the JR Chuo-Sobu and Keisei lines. Last time I went to a Marines game I used the bus back to Makuhari-hongo and it's pretty fast. (Makuhari-hongo Station also gets you to Chiba Station.)
Dan and I went to the ballpark just after visiting the store. We took the monorail to Chibaminato Station and then the Keiyo line to Kaihim-makuhari. I knew there was a bus to go to the ballpark from the station but I didn't see it and we just decided to follow the crowd. Not sure what we would have done after the game to head back to Tokyo if my friend Steve hadn't given us a ride to Funabashi (to pickup stuff off at your place!)
Post a Comment