Kill Time in Japan by Finding the Cutest Pokemon Cards
As the last few blog posts probably indicate, I've recently returned from Japan. Sometimes between museum visits, shopping trips, strolls in the gardens, etc, we'd have to kill an hour or two before another activity. In these spare hours, I challenge you to find the cutest pokemon cards you can. Like these!
I probably don't need to mention that Japan is the home of Pokemon, and odds are, if you're a giant Pokemon fan already, buying packs or one of the custom Pikachu plushes from the many "Pokemon Centre" stores spread around the country is probably already on your list.
But if you're a casual Pokemon enjoyer, and see opening Pokemon cards as expensive cardboard gambling, and the plushies as overpriced wastes of space, then a more cost effective Pokemon souvenir could be to find and purchase the cutest pokemon you can for only 30¥ each.
Alternatively, if your girlfriend has been heavily influenced by Japan thriftshop TikToks, you might find yourself in many different thrift shops in every corner of the city, and some of those thrift stores have pokemon cards too. Maybe the hunt for cheap designer handbags, and cute pokemon cards, can even complement each other.
Let's compare rifling through cheap cards to buying packs:
| Sorting through common cards manually | Buying packs |
|---|---|
| 100% of cards purchased are cute | 5% of cards are cute |
| 30¥ per card | 100¥ per card |
| Cards from ALL sets ever | Cards from only a couple sets |
This means you have a greater selection of cute cards, and 60x more cute for your yen.
This means for the price of a single Pokemon plushie (around $30 AUD if you were wondering 😬) you can bring home 100+ cute cards.
Where to find cards
Open Google Maps -> Search "Pokemon Cards". Go there and see if they sell bulk cards.
It's as easy as that. If you're in Tokyo, and near a train station on the Yamanote line, you'll probably have 10+ shops within 200 meters.
What you're looking for is any shop that has these big panels:
But this doesn't mean that they have what you want. This just means they're going to try to sell you shiny cards for $50 each. What you're looking for is the neglected boxes in the corner that look like this:
Sort though these. You'll find all manor of cute cards.
On our holiday, at some point Helen decided that Drowzee is the cutest pokemon in the world. We amassed quite the collection, and each card only cost a maximum of 33¥.
Helen also loves these eggs:
In an old bookoff in Ikebukuro, we found some really old cards too:
If you've a high-roller, willing to really spash out, for the whopping price of 200¥ each, you could obtain some extra cute full art cards like these:
Or even if you have a favourite Pokemon, you can gather a few extra of those:
But remember, the best cards are the cheap cute ones like these:
And remember to flaunt those cards when you get home.
Here are a few other cards that aren't necessarily cute, but we just thought were cool.
And now I've got a little box of cool Japanese cards! All labelled, and I'm going to throw it into a drawer and enjoy shuffling through the cards 10 years in the future.
