With this mission, I decided to try the 3 closest retro digging spots to central Tokyo I could find, heading out an hour from The Tokyo Sky Tree landmark..What would we find today??
As a lot of these stores do not allow photography, some of the pics are a taken hurriedly, so are a tad blurry.. Apologies
Spot1 : Edogawa kirakuza
The surrounding area seem to be largely populated by sneering, sake swigging old men around the station, but I came across a traditional Japanese tobacco stand seemingly staffed by cats.
An easy 10 minute trek over the river brought me to spot 1 on my planned 3 point journey, seemed a bit small, but appearances can always be deceptive..
Retro content : nothing , although the ps2 section was well stocked, and I noticed they had Mushihimesama PS2 "creepy pervert limited edition" with the 9 year old Reco character toy for 3900 yen.
Overall, nothing that couldn't be found anywhere else...Mission fail!
Disappointed, I rapidly hunted out the bus stop to hit..
SPOT 2 : Couldn't read the sign!!
Things had to get better..(?)
This place was in a really quiet neighborhood, and full of kids trading whatever card game cards are de rigeur at the moment..
Retro content.. sparse!
This place was almost the same as the last one, mostly recent titles, although they had a tiny sliver of cheap famicom carts at the end of one aisle.. Maximum price was about 400 yen although none of the games grabbed my attention, but the prices were pretty good..
Rapidly moving on to the next spot by bus, my spirits were falling slightly with the idea of another failure..
At least none of the stores required walking along the side of a freezing cold highway for 40 minutes like my last mission. Everything was a walk or bus ride in populated areas.
A bus and a train ride later, I got to Uurayasu station and started the 10 minute walk to the kanteidan store.. When.. I spotted another place.. An unmapped location! My retro sense was tingling!
BONUS SPOT! Urayasu Tokujiro! TV game! CD sell!
This place was actually well stocked, They were trying to push "blind selection" packs of 1000 yen 10 packs of famicom carts, or 10 Famicom carts and a chinese famiclone, interestingly..
Cart prices were priced by people who knew the value of stuff, and went from 400 yen all the way up to 6000 for rarer carts.
They had the same random game packs for PS2 games too, but they were wrapped so you couldn't see what you were getting.
Sadly Titles like Super Mario 3 and Ninja Gaiden were priced in the 4000 yen range.
No disk system games were spotted.
Hardware wise, the prices were pretty brutal. 5000 for an unboxed famicom, and an utterly shocking 9000 yen for an unboxed famicom disk system, no Twin Famis, although at this point I was wondering how much one would be if I actually found one.. No Neo Geo pocket stuff was seen.
Peripherals wise, there were a lot of loose controllers and the Hori Ps1 RPG controller seemed to be in abundance , priced around 900 yen.
In all, while I didn't get anything, this place was a great spot as its close to a station, clean, not too far out, and has a good selection, if a little awkward thanks to its bundling policies.
They had a nice healthy section of PCE and saturn games priced around 1900 yen a pop, too pricey for a tight fisted bargain hunter such as myself..
Boxed N64 games were going for 3000Y each..
If you cant read the Japanese cartridge spines, you'll have to play retrogame Jenga in this place!
Overall: A nice shop with a good vibe, not the cheap, but a fun place to dig through a lot of games,and get blind selection cartridge packs..
On to the final spot of the day:
Urayasu kanteidan.
What a dirty joint this was.. It looks small from the outside, but there is stuff stacked to the ceiling!
The first thing I noticed was a boxed PCFX high on a shelf, on taking it down I was showered with dust and dirt and had to wipe the dust off the price tag to read it.. 9000 yen.. God knows how long it had sat there untouched.. I found another 2 boxed PCFX units at the back of the shop.
The staff were watching me like a hawk, so I only got 2 pics, sorry!
Hardware was stacked all over the shop, mostly sega saturns , sega megadrives and PS2's , but the weird thing was, most of it was dotted around on the very tops of the tall shelves near the ceiling.. It was quite a workout on the neck..
They had a few famicoms, priced at 5000 yen, and a few of the newer famicom reissues with AV out, at a lower price of around 3000, varying on wether they were boxed or not.
Some of the other hardware was stacked so high up in the rafters it looked impossible to get down.
Again, bundled packs were in abundance , mainly of sega Saturn games this time.. You could get semi decent, barely carriable instant Saturn collection for 14000 yen.
The PCE section was good, but again no loose carts (where are they??) and found Alien Crush for a quite shocking 5000 yen, I wonder what the price is for Devil Crash?
A pretty average action game such as Kato Chan and Ken Chan was 4000 yen too..
After seeing Kato and Ken priced like that, I was beginning to realise that games featured on game center CX were priced almost double, good or not. Including the legendary "kusoge" (crap game) , "Beat takeshi's island adventure" at around 1000 yen.Overall..OK I guess, if you want a PCFX, bulk Saturn games and dust in your lungs!
While I did fail in getting any bargains , the run between Tokujiro and kanteidan is an excellent way of hitting up some retro stores in a short time in an easy to access area if you visit Tokyo..there's also 2 other game shops on the route, but they only carried recent releases and used sections for DS, 3DS, PS3 and 360.
I recommend the Urayasu station area for tourists wanting to hit up a Kanteidan thats not miles out fo the city, price wise, not much different to Akihabara, but maybe fun for a dig.
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