I'd been planning my 2019 trip to Japan ever since my first trip to Japan back in 2013. I frequently picked Ryan's brain about which card shops to make sure I went to and Ryan always raved about the Mint Kashii store. He said that they had "an amazing inventory for such a small, out-of-the-way store" (Kashii is in the north-east part of Fukuoka-City, about a 12 minute train ride from Hakata Station which is the Shinkansen Station in Fukuoka). Imagine my dismay a few years ago when I stopped seeing anything about the store on Mint's web site. Had I missed my opportunity to go to this great store?
It turns out that they didn't go out of business, they just moved to a new location a few blocks east of Hakata Station and changed their name to Mint Hakata. Their new location is much more convenient than the old one and is maybe a mile to the west of Mint Fukuoka. And conveniently for me it was about three quarters of a mile away from my hotel.
I will say that it's a bit of a foreboding location. The building the store is in is kind of a generic looking concrete building (that I unfortunately didn't get a picture of). The store is on the third floor (I think) in a remarkably bland looking hallway:
That's the elevator on the left and the store is the door in the center of the photo. Here's a closer shot of the door:
Here's a couple photos of the inside of the store:
The store appears to still have the amazing inventory that Ryan had raved about. There were BBM singles available that I think went all the way back to 1991. He also sold complete, hand-collated sets and had a large selection of opened box sets (these are the box sets with the hits removed that are usually sold for a huge discount from their unopened prices). I don't know for sure what their price for common single cards is - Ryan thinks it's 50 yen per card. Given their selection they're a very good store to do set building at - perhaps the only store west of Nagoya that that can be said about.
I didn't do a lot of set building here though. I picked up one card I needed from each of the 1994, 1998 and 2000 BBM sets along with Takashi Toritani's 2004 BBM Rookie Edition card. The four cards ran me 500 yen. I'm not quite sure how that broke down but I suspect it was something like 200 yen each for the 1994 and Toritani cards and 50 yen for each of the 1998 and 2000 cards. I also picked up the new BBM Lions set there for 1500 yen although I should have waited. Ryan had cautioned me that I would probably find it cheaper when I got back to Tokyo and of course he was right. Still I was pretty happy with the store - especially since it had been about five days since I'd made any progress towards completing the sets I was working on.
The store takes credit cards. There was a writeup of it in the final Sports Card Magazine - #121 in January of 2017 (my post for the issue says the write up is for Mint Kashii but it really was Mint Hakata - the store hadn't updated its website URL yet.)
Here's a map showing the store's location:
UDPATE - this is yet another store that I revisited on my 2024 trip. This time I made sure I got a picture of the outside of the building:
The big change inside is that the doors in the very bland hallway are grey now instead of green which makes them somewhat blander:
I did quite a bit of set building on this visit as I was able to find a lot of the cards that I had not been able to find at other stores. I also picked up the new (at the time) BBM Marines team set for 1200 yen here. I probably spent a good 45 minutes going through singles here. I had been holding out hope that I'd be able to find singles from the 2023 Calbee Hawks set here - them not having them was really my only disappointment there.
Here's a new photo from the interior of the store - looks pretty much the same as it did in 2019:
