I've mentioned before that the distribution of baseball card shops in Japan seems to be very lopsided, with more than half of the shops that I know about being located in Kanto. There are only four that I know of in Kansai - the antique toy store Kinkys and three Mint stores - Mints Umeda and Daimaru Shinsaibashi in Osaka and Mint Sannomiya in Kobe. I've not been to Kobe so I haven't been to that store but I like Mint Umeda despite it not really being a good set building show. Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi had opened since my previous trip to Japan so I decided to take a look at it when I was in Osaka back in May of this year.
As the name implies, the shop is located inside Daimaru Shinsaibashi which is a department store located on Midosuji Avenue in the Chuo ward of Osaka, just five or six blocks north of Dotonbori canal. The shop is on the ninth floor of the store.
I'll be honest here - this really isn't my kind of store. It's definitely in the "Mall Shops with only hits" category. There were unopened boxes and packs of recent stuff and a lot of expensive cards lining the walls and cases. I didn't see any singles from recent sets or boxes of random cards to pick through although I won't swear they weren't there. I did a quick walk through the store so it's possible I missed something.
Like Mint Shinjuku, there's nothing wrong with this kind of store if all you're looking for are unopened boxes and hits. It's just not what I'm looking for from a store. I wouldn't say I was disappointed with the store, though, as it was pretty much exactly what I expected from it.
Here's a map showing the location of the shop:
2 comments:
Honestly Mint stores as a whole might as well be the mall shop with only hits you're describing. Considering they're usually in higher-end places with high rent, they're kinda doomed to mostly cater to the parts of the hobby that prove to have the best returns (I'm not sure if they do but if nothing else the way these stores still operate and probably cut back on time/manpower not having to care for singles beyond the big money items says a lot).
I suppose that like Bits there are indie mom-and-pop shops (very likely in the rural areas not immediately accessible by trains from Tokyo) but whether or not they have any presence online beyond untranslated FC2 blogposts from someone who visited once in 2011 is a big question mark. I'm not sure how many survived the rise of Yahoo Auctions/COVID-19/the shop owners likely getting old and retiring.
There's Mint stores that I think are still decent places to find things other than hits and unopened stuff - Ikebukuro, Kashii, Odawara, Urawa and Ponyland all come to mind. Kashii, Odawara and Ponyland at least are all more like BITS in that they seem to be mom-and-pop stores. I didn't get any sense for who owns Ikebukuro or Urawa. I'm always surprised but happy that these shops are still in business and haven't been wiped out by Yahoo! Japan Auctions the same way Ebay took out a lot of card shops in the US 25 years ago.
Even the shops in the malls have different levels of inventory. Sure, you've got shops like this, Shinjuku and Fukuoka but there's other ones that have recent singles and random other things like Umeda, Yokohama, Sendai and Fukuoka Parco. This is what I was trying to get at in this post but I don't know if I really conveyed my point well.
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