Guest Column: Record Shopping in Japan
In a comment last week one of our loyal readers asked if he could write a guest column about his experiences buying vinyl in Japan. So without further ado, we offer:
Record Shopping in Japan
By Mike Falcon
For most of my adult life I have been very interested in Japanese culture. I love their movies, art, food, culture, and overall aesthetics. I studied Japanese while in college as my obligatory foreign language and have traveled there a few times. Something I have found very interesting about Japan is how they appreciate American and Western culture. Japan is very different from America or Europe but as a society they have a very deep appreciation for key things from these cultures. It was so amazing to me to eat various Western foods in Japan and find that the Japanese do Italian, French, Brazilian, and Spanish food more authentically than is available in the U.S. I ate in a small Italian restaurant where the chef took pride in his Italian food on a level I think could only be found in Italy itself. For me the Japanese appreciation of Western culture is most evident in three of “my favorite things:” Jazz, vinyl and baseball. I will save you from my interesting and wonderful experiences with Japanese baseball and other observations because this in an article about vinyl hunting.
The Japanese, relative to the U.S., have a lot of record and CD stores. I don’t believe they have suffered the same setbacks as the American record industries have, as the music store business seems much healthier. In Tokyo you can find corporate-owned music and DVD stores eight stories tall that would take a day or more to explore. These places were interesting but I found the small record stores
