Mandarakes

I thought I'd (finally) complete my posts about the card shops I visited on my trip to Japan last May with a quick post about the two Mandarake stores I went to.  Mandarake is a chain of antique stores in Japan that specialize in manga, toys, and other things including, of course, baseball cards.  There are 15 stores across the country, from Sapporo up north all the way west to Fukuoka.  I stopped briefly in the one in Nagoya back in 2019 but my main interaction with them the past few years has been ordering cards from them on-line - they ship to the US!  On this trip, I visited their stores in Fukuoka and the Nakano ward of Tokyo.

I had walked by the store in Fukuoka in 2019 on a Sunday morning on my way from Tenjin to Maizuru Park but it wasn't open at the time.  It wasn't somewhere that I had really intended to visit on this last trip until I realized it was only about four blocks from Mint Fukuoka's new location and I could do both shops with only one subway trip.

It took a few minutes once I entered the store to find the baseball cards.  The store is large and has a lot of stuff but if I remember correctly, there were signs or a directory (in English) that told me where the cards were.  They were in the back of the first floor on the far right.  I think I needed to ask someone about Calbee's but they had several binders full of 70's era cards.  I know I bought a few but I don't remember what I bought at this point.  I realize that this may be somewhat less than useful but I can at least tell you that the store has Calbees available in it.  To be honest, I found the Mandarake store much more useful than Mint Fukuoka but your mileage may vary.

The Nakano store is located in the Nakano Broadway shopping center which can be somewhat intimidating crowd-wise.  Ryan had taken me here on my first trip back in 2013 and the crowds put me off enough that I made us leave.  I went here again with Ryan on my last day of this trip.  Ryan reminded me of my reaction to the crowd the first time we went but I think that after dealing with Japanese crowds for two weeks on this trip, I was able to take them in stride a little better.

Instead of there being one big Mandarake store in the mall, they have a series of separate shops (39 in all across four floors!) that all specialize in a different genre.  The card shop is on the second floor:

They had a bunch of old baseball cards in a glass case.  You can see there are both Calbee and Takara cards available:

They also had a bunch of singles in boxes by the cash register that you needed to ask to see.  This was where Ryan and I spent most of our time here.  I again wasn't really intending to buy any cards here but, of course, I found a couple that I had to grab.

Ryan had said there was another shop on the same floor that he'd seen baseball stuff at but we had to walk around a little before we found it.  It turned out that it was Mandarake's store for movie memorabilia which also includes baseball stuff.  Here's one of the display windows in the hallway:

Ryan had noticed a Sadaharu Oh card in the window that I was pretty sure had been a giveaway at a Giants game in 2008.  We went into the store so that he could buy it - I told him if he wasn't going to get it, I was.  The store had a lot of movie posters that I briefly looked through - I was thinking about getting one for my oldest daughter if I saw a movie I knew she liked but I wasn't sure how I could get it home in one piece.  Ryan pointed me to a bunch of baseball publications towards the back of the store.  I thumbed through them for a bit before coming across an interleague program for the Tigers from 2005 that included two baseball cards.  It was only 1000 yen so I grabbed it.

I'm not sure I'd prioritize going back to either of these stores on a future trip to Japan - it's a bit unpredictable what you may find there.  But it's a little like going to G-Freak - if you've got the time and feel like looking through boxes of random cards, there are worse places to go.  And you might get surprised by what you run into.