Card Shops In Japan - Part One

It took me a couple minutes to find them since they weren't in the building I thought they were, but once I located them, I walked in and a big smile broke out on my face when I saw all the boxes of single cards available.

These cabinets contain binders full of Calbee cards from the 1970's to the present as well as the more valuable BBM cards - rookies, inserts and parallels.

I probably spent a good two hours going through their singles for a bunch of BBM sets, plus another hour the next day when I came back with Ryan.  (I needed something like 110 cards from the 2004 BBM 1st Version set which is roughly a quarter of the set.  I wanted to see if I could simply pick up a complete set rather than try to get all the singles.  After talking to the guy at Mint Ikebukuro, I was convinced that I needed to get all the singles after all.  So I needed to go back to Quad Sports.)

Ryans says that their singles start at about 30 yen a card, cheapest he's found.  I can't confirm this since I didn't really get a price break down of what I got.  Beyond the singles, I picked up a bunch of Calbees and the parallel issue for the Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 1987 set that look like 1987 Calbees.   My total bill for Saturday was around 9000 yen.  I don't quite remember how much I spent on Sunday but it probably wasn't much more than 2000 yen.

There were two guys working at the store.  One spoke some English, the other one not so much.  But they were both very helpful.  (I think I saw the English speaking one at the Tokyo Dome on Sunday night but I'm not sure.)

Mint is a chain of about 20 card shops in Japan.  I would eventually get to four of them - Ryan's been to several more.  Their Ikebukuro store has been recommended to me by both Ryan and Deanna Rubin as the best in Tokyo, at least for finding single cards.

The store is located just a little way from Ikebukuro station (and actually is only about a 20 minute walk from Quad Sports if you're feeling like a little exercise).  There's actually three distinct stores - one on the first floor that seemed to have a lot of more expensive stuff and two on the second floor.  I looked around at the first floor shop briefly, then headed upstairs.  When I got to the top of the stairs on the second floor, there was a store to the right and a store to the left.  I went in to the store on the left and never made it into the one on the right - Ryan says it specializes in gaming cards.

The shop was smaller than Quad Sports, but packed with lots of cool stuff.  They also were a bit better organized with their singles - I didn't have to lift any boxes up to get to other boxes.  Again, I spent a couple hours here going through boxes of singles, especially their old Calbees.

I had an incredible stroke of good fortune at this store - while I was there, Dean, an American who'd been living in Tokorozawa for the last 28 years came walking in to look at an old Calbee card of Shigeo Nagashima that the store owner had located for him.  We got to talking (he thought he'd seen the blog) and he offered to translate any questions I had for the store owner.  This was unbelievably helpful and I was able to locate some things that I was looking for.  Beyond being helpful in translation, Dean was also a real nice guy with a lot of useful information, so I was very lucky to run into him.  

Again I'm not exactly sure what I paid for everything.  Ryan says that the single cards usually start at around 100 yen a card.  I bought a BUNCH of old Calbee and other cards from the 1970's (including the 1973 Calbee Sadaharu Oh card) so I ended up spending around 15000 yen there.  This was the most I spent at any one store.

Coletre, Ikebukuro

Coletre is a store that I found through an article in Sports Card Magazine (although Ryan had checked it out for me).  I think they've been around for a little bit as an internet-only store and only opened the brick and mortar shop last October.  (Dean had seen the guy running the store at a card show previously and asked him a little about the store's history.)

The store is located only a couple blocks away from Mint Ikebuburo.  Dean was not aware of it when I mentioned it to him so he took me up on my offer to go there with me.  And I was really glad he did, because it took a little doing to locate the store.  I knew roughly what building, but there wasn't anything obvious that said where it was.  Dean finally asked someone at a nearby bar and they told him how to find it.  They are on the fourth floor of this building.  The sign in the foyer has their name in katakana, which I wasn't able to read.  But I could read the sign on the door.

It's a very small shop and they're still getting organized.  I was worried at first that I wasn't going to be able to find anything I was looking for but once Dean starting talking to the guy running the shop, everything changed.  He (the shopkeeper) dug up a bag from underneath the tables in the middle of the room and brought out a bunch of BBM cards from the 1990's that I sifted through, finding most of the remaining 1990's cards I wanted that I hadn't found at the other stores.  He also pointed out the two boxes of opened box sets (3 for 1000 yen!) that Ryan had told me about but I hadn't noticed until he showed me.  (By opened box set, I mean one that's been opened and had the insert and/or memorabilia cards removed but still contains all the base cards.)  I ended up buying six box sets (2012 Hiroshima Starting Lineup, 2012 BBM Suntory Dream Match, 2012 BBM Greatest Games 10-8-1994, 2012 and 2013 BBM Farewell sets and the 2012 BBM Tomaoki Kanemoto Retirement set) and maybe 10 or so BBM singles from the 1990's.  My total bill was only 2000 yen - he basically gave me the singles for free.  (Or he overcharged me for the singles and gave me the box sets for free - I would find in the next couple days that I could have beaten their price on the box sets.)

That wraps up my first day of card shopping.  I'll have more to post soon.