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| Mandarake Henya: Nakano | |||
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This oddball collection of decades-old commercial artifacts is definitely our favorite part of the Mandarake comic-book shop. It feels like you're visiting a museum of mid-Showa-era Japanese consumerism, except that everything is for sale.
A rounded 1950's TV tube greets you in front of the cave-like entrance, and once inside you're surrounded by an atticful of leftovers from the pre-Gameboy era. There are old tin trains, planes and other toys, and an assortment of big metal advertising signs with familiar names but old-fashioned typefaces. You'll find jumbo-size character goods from long-ago TV ad campaigns: foot-high models of Mr. Contac, the dancing cold capsule of the 1980s (priced Y15,000-20,000) and similarly capsule-shaped bartenders from the "Tory's Bar" Suntory ads of the 1960s. We were especially captivated by the shelves of ancient table radios. There were more than a dozen on display, ranging from the pre-FM 1940's to stereophonic '60s, and all in working order. The inscriptions on their front panels were promising - "Wide Sound Personal" and "Wide Sonic Super" - but unfortunately the non-existent radio reception in this part of the building meant that we couldn't hear them for ourselves. Apparently there's not a fierce collector's market for old radios, so the prices were lower than we expected - starting at just Y7,000 for a dayglo-orange Sony model from the sixties, and running to around Y15,000 for some of the older specimens. by Robb Satterwhite |
Mandarake Henya
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