If I’m ever going to become homeless in Japan, it will likely be in Den Den Town. I’ll have dropped the last of my yennies at whatever store I could buy cheap figures, games, and anime there. The store is a total cornucopia of anything and everything that deals with geekdom, no matter what type of otaku you are.
Right now, I’m working on a big spread of articles about Den Den for the Modern Method network, but throughout them I’ll try to inject some anthropological-type observations, in the hopes of sounding smarter. One of the things that I found really interesting, and will deal with in a couple of the posts, is the difference between American and Japanese game stores.
Two things are majorly different. First, there’s the fact that the stores offer a greater variety of products, usually with only one or two copies of a game on the shelf, and then the rest of the stock in the back. If a game runs out, they just replace it on the shelf. In addition to this, the shelves are organized very concisely, both alphabetically, and by genre.
I went and asked one of the store clerks about this, and he said that it’s because if a customer can’t easily find what he is looking for, then he’ll get frustrated and leave the store, possibly never coming back. If they’re just coming in to browse around, then they can find the section that fits their wants, and browse from there. It’s certainly far from this back in the States, where games are in some general sort of order, but no true organization exists. The ideology there is that the customer spends more time looking for what they want, and find other things that they want to buy too.
The second difference is that there’s a much greater emphasis on the past generations of the games. Here in Japan, the PS1, Super Famicom, and N64 libraries are robust, not the stale leftover sports games that litter Gamestops across the 50 states. Stores will try to get rid of older products as quickly as possible in order to put in newer games. Here in Japan, though, there are still advertisements for PlayStation 1 games in the recent issue of Famitsu — SquareEnix was advertising some of their “Greatest Hits” titles, and included several PS1 games. That’s something that would never fly in the States.
This is most likely due to the more widespread acceptance of games here in Japan than it is in the ‘States, but that’s something I’ll be going further into next week, which will pop up on Destructoid. I’ll be sure to include the links here as a batch, along with some analysis of the readers’ reactions. Let’s see how it all turns out.
