Re: Bizarre Japanese guitars
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 10:56 am
Wonderful! I'll be there in mid-April, as will noted Top Liked Guy JSP (FM spacebar.)llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 3:35 pm The Beautiful Guitars thread reminded me that I needed to start preparing for a trip to Tokyo this spring. Will be there for less than a week on a longer family trip to SE Asia to see our in-laws. So I can do a little scurrying away here and there, just not sure how much.
Ideas for gear scavenging around there? Not really budgeting for anything but the usual travel expenses, but it would be great to find a cool mic like the Sony C-38b for less than the ~$700 USD they go for on ebay, though I’m not sure if those examples aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel already… I can’t imagine much of the good stuff being that much cheaper, but a cool mic would be much easier to bring back than a guitar.
While we’re at it, any music related recommendations - venues, record stores, that sort of thing - are appreciated.
When I went in 2023, it was clear that most of the "deals" that you'd find in Tokyo kind of don't exist anymore. The Ochanomizu area is kind of legendary for guitar shops, but when I was there, they didn't really have special/unique inventory. A lot of MIJ Fender stuff and the like, but most of it was less than 30 years old. It's still a trip to bounce around all the shops, but having done it once, I don't feel a strong need to do it again. FM sleepkid has noted to me that for the best deals, you have to go outside of the big cities proper and do some digging there.
For record stores, the multi-story Disk Union in Shibuya is really something else. Beyond that, most of my LP haul last time was from cities outside of Tokyo.
