Mister X Does Tokyo!

Jet Lag CHECK
Blurred Vision CHECK
Blistered Toes CHECK

Mister X enjoys a different kind of travel, definitely not a vacation but more location immersion. I just got back from the center of the boombox and Walkman World with the intention of seeing one of the world's great cities and maybe finding some cool electronics along the way.

Armed with all the threads showing the locations of boombox and Walkman stores in Tokyo, I thought it would be an easy undertaking to find the boxes. Unfortunately location immersion means also checking out everything else and my companions and I only found a few of the legendary hotspots. The Japanese have a different word for portable cassette players making it much harder to ask where we could find them.

The good news is we did find some other cool places along the way. My companion and our translator live in Tokyo so we did go to known areas, but my goal was to also find the hidden gems, places they've never been too. We found some of those but they really don't like photos so we got what we could without getting in too much trouble.

I'll post some of my photos, if you have questions about your up coming trip feel free to ask, or definitely feel free to post photos or information about this great city.

 

The one thing your going to need is a lot of energy, we did take a few taxis, but walking and taxis's are the preferred ways to get around. The city doesn't end so if you really want to see more they have electric bikes for $15.00 USD a day that can really get you around. Energy drinks are plentiful over here but this one is very popular, I don't know what's in it but there's no caffeine or taurine. 7-11's are everywhere making munchies and drink easy to get.

I stayed a few blocks from the oldest brewery in Japan, makers of Sapporo Beer, this area is beautiful with parts of the old brewery, shopping, and an outdoor market area.

 

There's a lot of vinyl record shops in Tokyo, this building alone had over four including Next Records, Mother Records and Nerds Record Shop. It was late so only a few were open but they were basically the same, expensive vintage albums, mixed in with Japan-Only 180g albums. They really like the packaging and the presentation so a lot of them had booklets paired with the albums.

 

We checked out as many as we could, you could spend a lot of time just looking at records, and some of the stores even had tapes. Here's a typical display, with the famous new Sansui Boombox SCR-B2, a little portable mono box and the printed boombox-box to the right is a cardboard box to carry your newly bought cassettes. The equipment was similar to what you would find at an American Department Store, nothing to get excited about, the Sansui was priced at $80.00 USD.

For those wondering, the new Sansui is just a little bit heavier than air, you have to shake the packaging to make sure there's one in it.

 

I only got into the first few minutes of Lost In Translation, I'll have to watch the full movie; I love seeing where they filmed movies when I travel, we did get to a little hole-in-the wall down the street from my buddies place that seems to be a favorite of Quentin Tarantino. They had some signed Japanese Movie Posters on the wall from his movies.

My companion works in radio and entertainment over there, he pointed out this very small bar with one of the coolest sound systems in a bar, it was closed but it looked like a very nice beer selection. I thought I had a photo of the speakers, some nice vintage JBL's are on the back side.

 

I'd love to have this sign, maybe I'll bootleg it and sell them on Etsy. Probably the most influential video game to come out of the 70's, we must have played it hours, the Japanese Explosion was hitting big time. At first they didn't advertise that most of these games came out of Japan, our Space Invader Version was sold by Midway.

 

We did make it to Akihabara but I don't want to mislead you, we found very few vintage stereo shops. It was getting late mid-day and a lot of security doors were down. There's a ton of shops with cool old transformers, test equipment and other equipment I couldn't identify. CB's still seem to be big along with walkie-talkies, we also found a lot of cell phone shops with tons of old cell phones.

The train system in Japan is spotless and quiet, they do not talk on the phone on the train and they don't make a mess. The trains move quick and if you miss one, the next one seems to come within a few minutes, it makes getting around the city very easy.

 

The majority of the equipment "under the bridge" in Akihabara looks like this, a ton of walkie-talkies and CB radios.

 

There was a vintage stereo shop with mostly tube equipment that was open and they had a Denon Turntable I might have bought but it was behind a ton of stuff. This place had thousands of tubes, lot's of amps and some high end 50-60's equipment although I didn't see any Marantz. It was really tucked back in an alley and we were really lucky to find it since there was no signs telling what the shop was. Some of these shops have no photo signs everywhere which is weird because when we talked with them they said they have lots of international shoppers coming in and I would think that's because of sites like this.



Darn, another closed shop, after reading about some of the vintage toy stores it seems like they open when they feel like.

 

There was a few used computer and laptop stores, a used laptop was around $100, some looked pretty nice, but there was also a ton of toy stores including my favorite, vintage toys and game consoles. The Nintendo Family Computer Disk System, "Famicom" was a very popular JDM only game system from 1986. I've never seen one but here's a stack of used units for around $50.00 USD, they are very small up close.

 

Remember the Nintendo Game & Watch? These were very early LCD hand held games that are highly collectible today. The Nintendo Zelda in the box tops out around $800.00 USD and the Nintendo Lifeboat is $500.00 USD, the others go down to around $180.00. I've got a few of these boxed up, I got them cheap over the years at thrift stores and garage sales.

 

The stairway up to the shop had some great old dealer catalog pages for arcade games. While some are easily forgotten, Taito had at least two classics, Space Invaders and Defender.

 

One of the coolest vintage toy stores is also down here, Mandarake, with locations around the area but this one specializes in vintage toys. I just about fell over when I saw what they were getting for some of the toys I stage in my boombox shots, I bought my large Mazinger Z figures for a few bucks at a garage sale a few years ago.
https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/?lang=en



So many neat toys, they even had some Corgi's. They told me Thunderbirds and other Gerry Anderson Productions were very popular over here. There's check-out style aisles downstairs where you can sell your toys, there's was several people bringing in boxes of vintage joy. I should have bought the Corgi's, the SHADO was $25.00 USD and the four wheel blue one was $60.00 USD. The footprint isn't huge but there's eight floors of toys, they're kind of separated by floor.

 

Cassettes are gaining a little traction over there but the Japanese are different in that they like new state-of-the-art much better. The living quarters are very small and there's not a lot of space for extra items in Tokyo so collecting as we know it is different over there. Unfortunately we didn't get to see the walking Walkman, he's pretty hot right now.



It's part of a fun activity they have to collect stamps. This is the only display with the walking Walkman Stamp, they give you a comic book that has spaces for several stamps but you can only get this one here.

 

Anybody want to see the hottest new electronics? Yodobashi Camera is huge with just about anything you can think of including a full floor of new stereo equipment. You could easily spend hours looking at everything, luckily there's about 20 restaurants on the top floor when your done.
http://www.yodobashi-akiba.com/