Card Shops In Japan: Mint Odawara (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.

One of the shops that I was eager to revisit on this latest trip to Japan was Mint Odawara (I think the "official" name of the store is "Mint JAC Odawara").  To repeat what I said in my post about my first visit here on my 2019 trip, Odawara is a city in Kanto located southwest of Tokyo, nestled between the Hakone Mountains on the one side and Sagami Bay on the other and is one of the major gateways for heading to Mount Fuji.  It takes about a half hour to get there from Tokyo Station on the Shinkansen but more like an hour and a half to two hours by conventional trains.

This is yet another Mint store that moved in the past five years.  It used to be in the EPO shopping mall a couple of blocks from the train station but it's now in the Odawara Station Square (Ekimae) Building which, as the name implies, is located almost right next to the station.  I took this photo of the building from the walkway outside the station:

The store is located on the second floor of the building.  To get to it, you need to go into the building next to the Matsumoto Kiyoshi drug store on the left side of the ground floor.  If you look closely at the above photo, the entrance is just to the left of the man walking on the sidewalk just above the blue car.  Towards the back of the store is an escalator (or at least I THINK it's an escalator - it might be stairs) as well as an elevator.  The store is pretty obvious when you reach the second floor - at least when I was there, there weren't any other shops around.

Here are photos of both the outside and inside of the store:

This is a pretty good store for set building.  The shelves on the left side of the above photo have a lot of boxes of singles and I spend a half hour or so going through them, looking for cards from my want list.  I didn't find many but that had more to do with what was left on my want list after cleaning up at Quad Sports, Coletre, BITS and Mint Hakata than what was in stock here.  There were a lot of singles from BBM sets - flagship, Rookie Edition, Historic Collection and Diamond Heroes/Touch The Game/Genesis although not much from the team sets - and Calbee.  I was surprised to see a box of singles from Upper Deck's NPB issues from 2000 and 2001.  Ryan's comment about this store from 2019 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 can't speak to the gaming cards and US products but I think that's still a pretty apt description of their inventory.

The store's owner was pretty friendly and spoke some English - as always, his English was better than my Japanese.  He asked me some questions about what I was doing in Japan and we compared ages - if I remember correctly, he's 75.  I think his son helps him with the store - I was asking him about the Calbee Hawks cards and I think he was trying to tell me that his son would be along soon and spoke better English.  Unfortunately I couldn't wait around as I was heading to Shizuoka for a baseball game that afternoon.

To summarize, I think this is a good little store but I'm not sure it's worth going out of your way for it.  But if you have a few minutes to spare while traveling from Tokyo to or from points west, it's an easy side trip.

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