I just came back from summer vacation in Japan (first time in Japan) As you can imagine I was very excited about Japanese culture, architecture, technology and food of course, but as a watch nerd, the thing I was more excited about was watches. I once heard that Japan had a strong second-hand market for luxury goods, where you could buy luxury bags, clothes, accessories (none of these of any interest for me) but of course watches as well and that indeed was of much interest. So before I made the trip I searched all things related to watches, watch stores and Tokio vintage watch collectors.
Tokio is heaven for vintage watches collector
I found a few articles regarding this, some of them very helpful giving some recommendations for the best stores. Even though Japan is a very educated and technological country, there is a very strong language barrier, and most of the time the stores are not on plain sight. (we´ll talk of that later on) So it is not always easy to find the store you are looking for, or even worst, if you are not looking for a specific store and you are just fishing for second-hand watches, you definitely will have a hard time asking around or even googling it, so having in advance the name and address is very handy.
Helpfull information
I wrote down the name of a few stores I had to visit, but they were quite far one from another, and as I wrote before some of them were not on plain sight and even if you google them it might be really hard to find them because of the language barrier or they could be on the back of a building, or for example one of them was actually on top of a Church in Ginza. After visiting a few stores I went to NJ´s store, they had a great inventory, but as I was looking for a specific AP that they didn’t have in that store, they sent me to other of their locations, it took me around one hour to get there, but when I finally arrived I was amazed, it was like nothing I had ever seen before, it was like a marketplace in Nakano with comic books, cheap clothes, second-hand iPhones and iPads, old books, ice cream machines, I wouldn´t imagine that in that place I would find some of the most amazing watches I had ever seen.
I remember at least 8 different stores, one next to the other, all of them selling new, second hand and most of them vintage timepieces, you could find from Seiko to Richard Mille passing through all kinds of Rolex, A. Lange and really nice F.P. Journe. Regarding new pieces you could find a good variety (not as big as a brand boutique of course) at very good prices, sometimes better and sometimes similar as what I can get with my local dealer with which I have a good relation, what is really impressive is the second-hand watches, you could find a huge variety of beautiful A. Lange F.P. Journe, great Vacheron, JLC, Breguets and of course Pateks some at incredible prices, of course, that some special pieces like an AP Jumbo or a new Steel GMT with jubilee bracelet have a different «market» price but still better than must of other countries.
Vintage
Then you have the Vintage market, stores like Jack Road have an amazing and really big inventory. As we know the prices of vintage timepieces have grown for the past years, but still, you could find very nice Rolex, Omega, IWC, JLC, Universal Geneve and Longines for a reasonable price, Here I was lucky to find and buy my first vintage watch. I loved that «market» you could find an amazing variety of watches all in the same place.
Now if you have the time there are another kind of stores, remember I told you about store that were not always easy to find, well in Japan there are a lot of store that sell different things for collectors like cameras or even scale model trains, well it is in this kind of store you might find a «treasure» a really nice vintage watch in good condition at a very very good price, for these stores you need some exploring skills and good luck, but it is totally worth it, it is quite an experience, to do some research and walk the city, finding cool store out of nowhere.
It seems that watch culture in Japan is more of a collector thing than a luxury market. I end up buying a few pieces, it was a great experience and I am looking forward to go back and learn more about Japanese culture and of course find some cool watches.
I just open my Instagram account as @watchnerdmx were I show some of my watches and events I am invited to.
