FYeahJapan: Nerdy Shopping in Nakano Broadway

Akihabara is probably one of the most popular and famous places in Japan for nerdy shopping but there is another place which is just as awesome and only a couple short stops away from Shinjuku station Nakano Broadway. We visited Nakano during our first few days in Japan and it was amazing I had honestly never seen so much awesome nerdy stuff in my life it was even better than comic con and the prices were pretty damn reasonable to.

Nakano has several Mandarake stores which I only discovered whilst I was there and now I'm addicted, they even ship Globally to but the best thing is that if you're looking for anything in particular you can check online to see what store has it AND they will tell you exactly the store to find it HOWEVER be prepared to search, these stores aren't really organised and there are boxes of random stuff everywhere! I wanted to get a Nana Hello Kitty keychain and it was in a box with literally hundreds of other Hello Kitty charms so I had to dig but I did eventually find it YEY!

As with Akihabara it's good to shop around in Nakano because prices can vary drastically from store to store for example I bought a Sailor Moon figure for 500 yen from one store but there were other stores charging 1500 yen for the exact same figure, as Japan isn't custom to price haggling it's best to search all the stores first for what you want before you buy to find the best price.

Nakano Broadway is a great place to find items from older anime which is great for people like me as I haven't really watched much of the newer stuff, other stores like Animate were completely alien to me aside from their tiny Sailor Moon and Attack on Titan sections. There were quite a few superhero related things there to which caught my eye (ALL Captain America Hot Toy's) but most things were Asian based (YEY Kamen Rider) and there was a lot of Disney things to so if you're a big Disney fan definitely check them out!

Most stores in Nakano (and Japan) only accept cash so be sure to bring lots with you and if you need to use an ATM the best ones to use (re: the only ones that worked with my card) are ones by 7/11 which you can find in their stores of some bigger department stores, so if you want to shop be prepared and bring the cash.

Gashapon are everywhere in Japan and of course you can try your luck with them in Nakano a there are rooms dedicated to them and they have anything from Sailor Moon to garbage cans to banana birds to used panties.... Errr yeah... but if you don't want to risk your yen getting something you don't want you can just but the ones you want from the stores there which is what I ended up doing after many failed attempts of trying to complete my dog sandwich collection.



Nakano is just like Akihabara but on a smaller scale and more focused on the nerdy side rather than the electronics, both places need about a day dedicated to them to explore as most of the shops are tiny but packed full of things and as I mentioned nothing is really organised so there's lot's of digging through random boxes to find the things you want but it's totally worth it as you can find some awesome stuff you never even thought existed.

Be sure to check out the videos above for our Nakano Broadway and Akihabara hauls

Love & Robots

Cate

xoxo