After not really buying CDs for the last few years, I bought 21 CDs in Japan! That’s a lot in terms of space and weight – which meant we had to buy a new suitcase (which we filled to 22.6kg, 0.4kg short of the limit). I also ended up carrying 10kg of stuff in my backpack. At least the CDs weren’t expensive, I spent about $50CDN on those 21 CDs!

There were a lot of places around Japan selling second hand clothes, books, games, DVDs and CDs. They weren’t particularly cheap, except I guess they had inventory/space problems and only wanted to store recent, popular goods. One chain, Book Off was really cool because they had shelves of &165;250 CDs. These CDs weren’t even that old – you could find stuff from 5 years ago on there. I spent a good deal of time browsing and picking up singles that I enjoyed from the 00s, 90s, and 80s.

There were two neat thing about buying used CDs in Japan (aside from the cheapness): 1) they had a lot of dance music which I was into (and still enjoy) when I was younger, and 2) a lot of the CDs were “Japanese versions”. This was a bonus since Japanese release of American artists typically have an extra track or two. For example, I picked up the Japanese version of Michelle Branch’s Hotel Paper which contained the bonus track Smooth (the Santana & Michelle Branche song).

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: CDs, japan, shopping