Card Shops In Japan: Mint Sendai (UPDATED)

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 attending an afternoon Eagles game at Miyagi Baseball Stadium on my day trip to Sendai, I headed for Mint Sendai.   This was my second visit to this store but my first since they moved to their new location.  They had previously been in the E BeanS shopping mall on the west side of Sendai Station but have since moved to the Parco Shopping Mall that's MUCH closer to the station - you pretty much walk outside the station and the Mall is right there.

The store is located on the eighth floor of the mall and I felt like I was going back in time when I stepped out of the elevator on that floor - I had to walk through a Tower Records to get to the card shop!  It took me back to the 1980's when I used to regularly haunt the store near the Foggy Bottom Metro Stop in DC.  

I didn't spend any time browsing in the record store, though. as my thoughts were firmly on baseball cards.  Here's a couple photos of the shop:

(I want to point out that I don't think the photo on the store's page at the Mall's website is actually of the store.  It looks more like Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi in Osaka - in fact you can see a cropped version of the same photo on the Osaka store's site.) 

The thing that really struck me about this store is that besides the hits, I didn't feel like they had many baseball cards at all.  They appeared to have a lot of non-sports cards but there were several boxes of random baseball cards beneath one of the counters.  The boxes I looked through had a lot of Calbee cards from the last ten years or so but they also contained random things like mid-70's Calbee cards and Hideki Matsui Home Run cards from the 1990's.  The big thing I was expecting to find here were team issued cards for the Eagles.  They had a lot of those and I think they also had singles from BBM's Eagles team sets although I may be misremembering.

When I came up with my new categories for Japanese card shops last month, I categorized this store as a "Mall Shop for building recent sets".  I'm not sure that's really accurate since I don't remember seeing singles for anything other than Eagles cards and random Calbees although I certainly could have missed them.  I'm not sure I'd categorize them as "Mall Shop with only hits" either though as they were a little more interesting to me than that.  Maybe the best way to think of them is somewhere in between those two categories - they have the recent unopened stuff and the hits but they also have some random other things.  It's definitely not a store you should expect to do any set building at (unless you're trying to finish an Eagles team issued set) but it's worth a visit if you've got a half hour or so to kill in Sendai.

Here's a map with the store's location: