Nakano Broadway

I took this picture outside a Mandarake outlet in Nakano Broadway. Check out the huge-as Papermoon Saber doll. Fancy lugging one home?

On a tip-off from Sket and the guys at Falcon's Hangar, I went to Nakano Broadway to hunt down some bargains and/or rare stuff when I got to Japan. Thanks for the tip, guys!

Some say Nakano Broadway has displaced Akihabara as the favourite haunt of otaku. It's a veritable trove of toys, manga, doujinshi and for the military geek, replica gun stores. For the 1/6 aficionado, the place to go to is Mandarake - a Japanese chain which takes up shop lots on sevaral floors of Nakano Broadway. (This is their main store, there are 4 other branches elsewhere in Tokyo.)

Mandarake buys and sells new and used toys and manga, and I've discovered that their prices are better than other stores in Japan. I scored a brand-new Azone Saber Fate/Hollow Ataraxia at Mandarake for ¥15,750 (a Volks store I visited in Osaka's Nipponbachi was selling Saber for over ¥22,000). So consider visiting Mandarake to save yourself some moolah. :)