Hi there, I just happen to be browsing a local Japanese bookstore in Singapore and I was truly amazed by its Japanese magazines and offerings! Looking at its magazine games section Its seems like Japanese are really dedicated to specific series or IP. There was even a perfect guide to PS VITA, frankly I see more Nintendo Japanese mag over the other Playstation or Xbox mag, # Wish I could read Japanese, else I would spend my entire day in the book store! (Trust me its a lot a lot of magazines and game related books) Below is a picture of project miku electric "piano"? and its guide book to go along. Anyone have such encounters in their own country or in japan?
The bookstore that you went to was Kinokuniya (at Liang Court), wasn't it? There's also another Japanese bookstore at the Central, although that one contains only Japanese stuff and nothing else (unlike Kinokuniya, which still has English material). The Liang Court branch is the only one with mostly Japanese magazines and books, since the Japanese population seems to reside around that region. The Miku Keyboard (Pocket Miku) is like a lite version of their Vocaloid synthesizer software. Users can control her voice without using a PC and the Vocaloid editor.
The shelving section label is without a doubt the same as the Books Kinokuniya ones so I'm quite sure that it is. We have one in the Sydney CBD but if one also heads into either Chinatown or Koreatown, there's actually plenty of full Japanese/Chinese/Korean bookstores or libraries (one of the libraries also stocks anime, manga, games and do cosplay costume rental). These ones tend to be harder to find but a lot of the time the pricing is better than Books Kinokuniya. The Sydney store used to have a larger range of English manga but the entire section has been cut - likely due to students hogging the small corridor-like space that all of the English localized manga was piled into, unsealing, reading them and them proceeding to dump stuff on the floor. It typically works out cheaper for me to import manga issues that they don't stock by default but they tend to have magazine issues or artbooks earlier than Amazon Japan does. Sadly it seems that my main interests are a bit too obscure to find things actually stocked by the store, whereas my husband always ends up buying stuff related to Biohazard/Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill whenever we visit the store. I'd probably be better of visiting something like a Book-Off or some used bookstores in Japan because I'm usually after way out of print/limited print run items. The Books Kinokuniya - Japantown in San Fran honestly put, had nothing but travel guides when we went to it. However, there were some smaller shops tucked away with goodies like official Capcom Tokyo Phantom merchandise (got some official t-shirts for about $20 a piece). I also forgot that my husband picked up a mint-in-box Hot Toys Biohazard 5 Sheva toy. Still kicking myself to have not pre-ordered the S.T.A.R.S. Wesker one...
Police station is literally downstairs on the ground floor, across the street. They had security walk the store, stand in the section, signs up all over the place. Two service counters at either end of this section of the store (the other side contained travel and art books, the entire sections to the right where the localized manga would be everything imported from Japan/China/Korea) to prevent it. They had loss prevention walking around the shop too and at the front door where they have a small art gallery and some displays. Most of the manga had open display copies and yet, people (typically, I found were either: 1. Chinese girls or 2. White weeaboos' both groups of which, attended the same girl's school I was, would be the ones opening things. The weeaboos would be using internet jokes or random Japanese words, particularly on any asian staff in the store. The Chinese girls from the school continued the same behavior as they had in school - screeching loudly at each other in mainly English or Cantonese (more speakers than Mandarin at our school) ACROSS THE SHOP despite being asked to be quiet in-store due to the reading cafe section and art gallery display including some audio pieces that went alongside the gallery itself) - the guys in the section would typically only check out the display copies or would ask the service staff if there were any. The girls were a pain in the ass and I refused to go into the store in my school uniform due to them and the cashiers following me around the shop despite my leaving my school jumper (so just a white shirt, skirt on and the uniform shirt was so thin it was practically see through and impossible to try and steal shit with) and bag at one of their counters when I simply wanted to inquire as to whether or not they had gotten in copies of certain manga either localized or in Japanese and the service staff would just roll their eyes at me and tell me to go and look in the section. Which, at the time was not alphabetized (or in any other sort of order outside of genres) - neither was the Japanese manga section. Due to this, manga or books that began with kanji often ended up in the Chinese import sections (*facepalm*) which made it a pain in the ass to find stuff. Since they removed the localized manga section for the most part - you can find some of it spread across the shop, not all in one big corridor - the customer service has helped and the shop hasn't been a pigsty. I do volunteer librarian work when I get the time to do-so, it drives me nuts seeing everything out of place or it being an absolute fucking mess like my classmates would often leave it, I would often end up tidying up the section when I went through if I went out with them because I was so ashamed of the mess they left. Of course, the ones leaving the mess were absolute asshats that I am no longer in contact with for multiple reasons. With the display copies of stuff in the import section, you can actually go over to the cafe inside the store and read it provided you pay for your food/drink. All other books unless they have glossy pages or have extra stuff in them aren't sealed with plastic wrap and you can do the same thing. Just if you're going into the cafe with a massive pile of books, security is going to come over and eventually tell you that you either need to buy something or move.
Hi sp193, yup its the Kinokuniya at Liang court, just happen to be there for drinks. I think those Miku fans will be grabbing the Miku Keyboard for collecting purpose I guess. haha I was so tempted to buy most of the Nintendo mags... =P
Why not just go ahead? Even if you cannot read Japanese, Japanese stuff usually have a lot of pictures, diagrams and photographs. If you're lucky, you can even understand what it's about without even reading... As for my experience with Japanese bookstores in Singapore, it's been quite alright because the popular content is at least quite easy to obtain... although I think that we had a dark past regarding censoring. I heard that up to around 2010, Kinokuniya used to censor magazines by cutting out whole pages. Thankfully, they seemed to have already done away with that practice by the time I started collecting magazines in 2011. It used to be that the magazines and books here were slightly overpriced. I remember joining friends to ship magazines and other stuff back from online shops like HobbyStock in 2012, since the Japanese online stores were letting their stuff go at lower prices. I am not sure whether that's still the case here, since I've stopped collecting magazines actively due to a lack of space and time (yea, National Service...). However, Kinokuniya here still has a habit of sticking their price tags (and that yellow "NOT SUITABLE FOR THE YOUNG" sticker on some others too) on their magazines, which are all difficult to remove without causing damage to the magazine's cover. Kinokuniya at Liang Court has the most Japanese stuff. Kinokuniya at Ngee Ann City has less Japanese stuff, but is the largest and might have stock of some magazines that the LC branch has run out of. Seems to be slower at restocking. Kinokuniya at JEM has a small Japanese section, which has a small selection of content. The other outlets usually have (nearly) nothing Japanese... lol. =_= Sometimes, if we cannot find certain books/magazines in their shops, we can visit the Kinokuniya BookWeb to order the book/magazine and they will deliver it to your doorstep.
