Now that I'm done with the posts about the cards I brought home from Japan in May, I'm going to start writing about the card shops I went to. I went to twenty one stores in all, although that total includes two Mandarake stores which aren't really card shops.
I was going to do posts on all twenty one but I realized that ten of the stores I visited are ones that I did posts on for the 2019 trip and nothing's really changed for them. They're still in the same locations and they still appear to carry the same things they did before. For these ten, I'm just going to update the previous posts I did with some new photos and information. So there will be no new posts for Quad Sports, Mint Akihabara, Mint Ikebukuro, Mint Urawa, Coletre, SportsCard BITS, Mint Umeda, Mint Hiroshima, Mint Hakata or G-Freak. (I'm not sure how soon I will get around to those updates though.)
That leaves me with only doing posts on stores that have moved since I visited in 2019 (Mint Shinjuku, Mint Sendai, Mint Fukuoka, Mint Odawara and Mint Shinjuku) and stores I'd never been to before (Mint Tachikawa, Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Kinkies, and Mint Fukuoka Parco). I'll probably do a single post on the two Mandarake stores I went to (Fukuoka and Nakano Broadway).
One thing I want to do here though is kind of categorize the stores. This is just my take on the shops - other people may have different opinions. What I want to do here is to give people a sense of what to expect from a store so they have an idea of what shop might have what they're looking for.
Note that I'm only categorizing stores I went to on this trip.
The first category is "set building" shops. These are the stores that carry lots of old singles so that you can finish completing sets. Personally, these are my favorite card shops in Japan. The shops in this category are Quad Sports, Coletre, Mint Ikebukuro, Mint Odawara, SportsCard BITS, Mint Hakata and Mint Urawa. I'm kind of wavering on Mint Urawa because I had a bad experience there this trip but they may have more singles than I thought.
The second category is (for lack of a better phrase) "random old stuff" shops. These shops will have vintage cards but it may be difficult to predict what they'll have in stock at any particular time. Basically this category includes the Mandarake stores as well as Kinkies - an antique toy and music store in Osaka. I'd also include Biblio in this category but I didn't make it there on this trip.
The third category is the "random stuff" shops and there's really only one in this group - G-Freak. He's got a lot of stuff and a lot of it is recent but it's really not a shop you can walk into expecting to knock items off your want list.
The remaining categories are for "Mall Shops" which are, as you'd expect, essentially relatively small shops in shopping malls (well, usually - Mint Fukuoka really isn't in a shopping mall but it's got that kind of feel). I used to lump all of these together but I've realized there really are two distinct groups.
The first group I'm going to somewhat ineptly dub the "Mall Shops for building recent sets". These stores will have a lot of hits and unopened boxes and packs but will also stock singles from most of the major sets for the past couple years. Some of them may also have random older cards as well. These stores are all Mint stores - Akihabara, Umeda, Fukuoka Parco, Sendai, Yokohama and Hiroshima.
The second "Mall Shop" category (and final overall one) is "Mall Shops with only hits". These are the stores that pretty much only stock hits and unopened boxes. These are my least favorite stores but if that's what you're looking for, they're the places to go. Again, these are all Mint stores - Shinjuku, Tachikawa, Daimaru Shinsaibashi and Fukuoka.
For me, personally, the amount of time I spend in a store is directly related to what kind of a store I think it is. I'll spend hours in a "set building" store but maybe a couple minutes in the "Mall Shops with only hits". The other shops will fall somewhere in between those two extremes.
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