Lights Out Omocha Souko

Three years ago the entrance to Omocha Souko looked like the above photo. Bright and lively. Today it looks like this, dead and dark:

Omocha Souko was a special place
From the excitement of the Famicom chace

To the agony of missing a cheap deal
That made me cry over a meal

When that place the retro gamer called heaven
Was lost in 1957*

*(actually lost in 2012, but its hard to find a word that rhymes with twelve and I was stealing this from a poem about Ebbets field which closed in 1957 and....anyway, never mind).

I have been meaning to do a final post in my series on the closing of Omocha Souko for over a month now. Before I could do that though I felt I needed one event to occur so as to bring a sense of closure to me, that event being the store actually closing.

I had to wait a while for that to happen because in typical Omocha Souko fashion (for all my love of the place it really was poorly managed) they couldn`t even go out of business right. After telling everyone they were going out of business on April 1st they just kept the place open for a few weeks longer in an attempt to get rid of whatever remaining crap they could sell.

The long, drawn out process was a pathetic site to see. A store slowly deteriorating - shelves emptying and not getting re-stocked, displays getting knocked over and nobody bothering to tidy them up.
It had a sort of poetic quality to it (hence the above poem.), with all the broken pieces nobody wanted left to sadly await their fate on the shelves. Headless nymphs:
Armless ballplayers:
Fallen angels:
And....all of this stuff:
The saddest site though was the once mighty glass showcase where they kept the nice Famicom games. It once boasted pride of place and had some actual good games in it but in the final days was basically tossed aside into a corner, with what meagre fare that remained not deemed valuable enough to even warrant locking the door anymore:
And the remaining merchandise was in the process of being crated up for transport to the Shingu store:
When the place finally closed a few days ago instead of feeling sad I actually felt a bit relieved that it had been put out of its misery. Which is a shame because I really do miss the place. Omocha Souko was the first place that I ever saw a Famicom game at, on my very first visit to the store just a week or so after it opened in 2008. They had a mountain of Famicom carts, thousands of them, in a huge pile at the top of their elevator. It was an amazing thing to see. There was a sign saying 300 yen each next to the pile. I didn`t know what they were at the time having never seen a Famicom before. They were clearly video game cartridges from some 1980s system, but other than that I knew nothing, except that they looked incredible in all their colorful glory and that I wanted them. It was from that moment at the top of that Omocha Souko escalator that I became hooked. A couple of weeks later I bought my first Famicom and the rest is history.

So on that note, this will be my last post about the place. Omocha Souko Fukuoka Honten: I salute you. Thanks for all the memories. And the games.

Omocha Souko Part 5: JuJu Densetsu vs Makai Shima

One of the great things about shops that you frequently visit is the little memories they leave you.

My favorite Omocha Souko memory is one from very early in my Famicom days, very shortly after I got my first Famicom.

This was way before I started collecting, I probably had about 15 or 20 Famicom carts at the time and the other 1035 of them were for the most part a complete mystery to me. My wife and I got into the habit of dropping by Omocha Souko once a week or so and buying a Famicom game that looked like it might be fun as a means of cheap entertainment for an evening. At that time Omocha Souko was charging a flat rate of 300 yen for most of its games (save the ones in the glass case), which was about the same price that it cost to rent a DVD. So for a couple of hours entertainment, a Famicom game was competetively priced. And, unlike rental DVDs, you could keep the game at the end of the day.

Anyway, I remember one evening back then the two of us hitting Omocha Souko. They had thousands of Famicom games on the racks. When I see their Famicom game racks now it doesn`t have the same effect that it used to. I know all the games they have because I have them too. There is no mystery. Back then though I didn`t know any of the games so it was massively interesting to explore the racks, trying to figure out which game might be good based solely on the game`s title and cover art.

That evening after spending a while searching the racks, we came up with two possible candidates. JuJu Densetsu and Makai Shima. My wife advocated for JuJu Densetsu. The monkey looked pretty cool and the name `JuJu` suggested fun, as did the cart`s green color.

I took up Makai Shima`s cause. The blue cart looked great. And in the cover art you could see the sailor knocking down little pirates with barrels, suggesting that it was not some crappy RPG but an action game of some sort. Throwing barrels at Pirates, I added, was an activity that really appealed to me.

We agonized for a while over the decision, but in the end JuJu Densetsu won out. That monkey is hard to resist. We took it home and were pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a pretty decent platformer. We definitely got our 300 yen`s worth that first day and it became a regular part of the lineup.

We ended up getting Makai Shima on a later trip. Its not bad either, but I have to concede that JuJu Dentsetsu is way better. A lot of other games fell into our hands on those `buy a game for the evening` trips - Binary Land, Nuts and Milk, Banana, Lode Runner and Yume Penguin Monogatari being some of the highlights. Eventually though we got to a point where we had a ton of games and the Omocha Souko racks stopped turning up games we were interested in as we had picked over all the best. Our little tradition came to an end. It was, however, fun while it lasted.

Omocha Souko Part 4: The Shinto Shrine to Video Games

Allow me to introduce Omocha Souko`s coolest hidden gem: its Shinto Shrine.

It is kind of hard to find, you have to enter through the back entrance to notice it. As you enter there is a cafe on your right and, across from that, a tori (shrine gate) at the foot of a staircase. It is called the Matsutake Jinja as the tori indicates:
The staircase (pictured above) is lined with traditional looking lanterns and is decorated like the rest of the store to look like a retro Showa town.

Get to the top and behold! The shrine!
Move close in though and you will notice something odd. The shrine has no deity!!
I think there may at one point have been some kind of statue there. Perhaps it was stolen or sold or something.

Anyway, I thought it looked a little lonely so when I was passing by a few days ago to take these photos I reached into my bag of Famicom carts I had just purchased and fished a random one out:
It is now a shrine to....that game with Ramen Man in it which I can`t remember the title of. Its a Kinnikkuman spin-off.

At least it was for a few seconds, I took the game with me when I left.

This is probably the coolest physical feature of the store. It might seem strange to have a religious structure in a store that sells, among other things, massive loads of porn, but in Japan this is pretty standard. Most factories and other big businesses here actually have a Shinto shrine dedicated somewhere on their property.

Omocha Souko Part 3: Why It Didn`t Work

In this post I thought I`d toss out a few ideas on why my beloved Omocha Souko store has failed so spectacularly after less than 4 years in business. I`ve come up with a half-dozen possible contributing causes, which I present below in no particular order.

1. Finance

As I illustrated in my previous post, Omocha Souko was a massive complex with a lot of cool design features that made it a fun place to walk around. Unfortunately stuff like that costs a lot of money, which means that Maxim City was probably (just speculating here, I have never seen their books) carrying a lot of debt that they incurred with the up-front costs of building the place.

Its a sad fact that people who just build bland warehouses to sell stuff in (like Book-Off) have a competetive advantage since those places are cheaper to build. If you are going to build a place with all the bells and whistles that Omocha Souko had, you have to attract more customers to make that initial investment pay off. While Omocha Souko was certainly never deserted, in my times there I rarely saw it packed with people. Usually you wouldn`t have to wait in line at all at the cashier, or at the most there would be one or two people ahead of you. That was great for me, but was also an obvious sign that they weren`t getting a huge amount of foot traffic.

2. Location

They chose an odd location for this store. The problem was that they opened up only 2 blocks away from 007, a store that sells the exact same variety of products. In fact you can actually see Omocha Souko if you stand across the street from 007, its only a few minutes walk away.

In general Omocha Souko was a way better store than 007. But that is just my subjective opinion as someone who was really only interested in their Famicom games. 007`s Famicom games are more expensive and they rarely get new stuff in so I only drop by once a month or so even though, like Omocha Souko, it is right on my daily commute.

In terms of other stuff though I am guessing that 007 was able to hold its own in competition with Omocha Souko. In particular they seem to do a lot better in selling those card games that kids like as I always see crowds of elementary and junior high school students crowding around 007 playing those games while Omocha Souko rarely does.

So for most of their products I think the two stores were really just splitting the market between them and 007 for whatever reason was the one that ended up winning.

3. Timing

Omocha Souko opened in October of 2008, which was exactly the same time that the global economy was starting to go down the tube. Japan was particularly hard hit at that time and in the first year after the store`s opening the Japanese economy contracted in every quarter. Consumer spending in general plummetted during 2009.

Immediately prior to that the Japanese economy had been doing relatively well, having sustained about 7 years of continuous growth that made it look like the troubles of the 90s had been solved.

In other words, by unlucky coincidence they chose the exact worst time to open their store. They made the plans for it during a time of growth but implemented them in a time of contraction.

4. Failed Side-Businesses

At the time they opened the complex included a few side-businesses that failed to take off and closed down. On the second floor they opened an okonomiyaki restaurant. My wife and I had lunch there once, it wasn`t bad. Like the rest of the complex it was decorated in a cute Showa-retro theme.

That closed down after about a year. Unfortunately I never took any photos of the place while it was open. For a while that section was closed off, but they later turned it into a pornography section:
The other failed business was a magic show. They set up a magician`s theatre in the first floor retro town area:
This also failed to take off and I don`t think they`ve had a magic show there in 2 or 3 years. Despite that the theatre is still there and you can see everything in there collecting dust as you walk by. Its a rather melancholy reminder of how the big plans they had when they opened the store never really worked out.

5. Online Competition

This is just a guess but for a lot of stuff that Omocha Souko sells, including video games of course, Yahoo Auctions and other online sources are probably biting into the bottom lines of physical stores. I don`t know if this is as advanced as it is in North America, but probably the same trend is hurting this type of store too.

6. Insanely low prices

This is pretty much summed up in my first post in this series. With their retro game stuff they have sold so much stuff to me at such ridiculously low prices that you have to wonder if they had priced them higher maybe they would have made a bit more money.

The counter-argument is that if they had priced them higher, they`d probably have a huge pile of over-priced games taking up space on their shelves collecting dust and not producing any income at all. So I`m not really sure if that actually hurt them too much or not.

Conclusion

I`m not sure which of these played the biggest role in the store`s demise, probably they all played a part. In general though the store was probably built in the wrong time, in the wrong place and with the wrong business plan. It was a great store for someone like me, but that just isn`t enough to spell success.

Related Posts:

-Omocha Souko Part 1: The Greatest Retro Game Store in the World
-Omocha Souko Part 2: The Grand Tour

Omocha Souko Part 2: The Grand Tour

October 1, 2008, by strange coincidence, was both the day that I moved to Fukuoka and the day that Omocha Souko Fukuoka Honten first opened for business.

Fate? I think so.

At the time it opened - and indeed, at the time it will close - Omocha Souko was a store the likes of which this city had never seen before. This was a mega project, the most ambitious toy, comic, game, clothes and general used good store the city had ever seen.

Prior to its opening Maxim City, the company that owns Omocha Souko, had two other locations in town. But this one was different. It was to be the flagship of the entire chain. It wasn`t just going to be a store, but a self-contained entertainment palace. My sorrow at the store`s passing isn`t just because I`ll miss its bargains but because it is without a doubt the most interesting store to just wander through that I have ever seen.

Lets take a little tour just to show what I mean.

Outside you are greeted by one of the two giant TV screens they have constantly broadcasting commercials for the store:
There are three entrances, this being the main one:
On the right as I walked in that day there was a bunch of vinyl albums for sale. Anybody looking for a copy of Richard Valentine`s Come Back Lover? Don`t be shy.Random stuff like that is to be found throughout the store. Just one more thing to love about the place.

The interior of the building is like a maze that you walk around with various passages, rooms and stairways interconnected with each other. The most brilliant part is the fact that the entire place is decorated to look like a post-war retro Showa cityscape with false storefronts everywhere.
It actually looks quite realistic in some places, with laundry even hanging outside the windows:They go all the way up to the ceiling, which is two stories high:
And have a lot of strange details, like this policeman in front of the Koban:
It is the type of place you can easily get lost in, but never be bored with exploring.

The first floor has a bit of everything. The toy section is perhaps the most impressive:
There is also a little shop selling mostly Showa retro style candy:
A little cafe:
The obligatory section dedicated to J-Pop and K-Pop goods:
The used electronics junk section:
And these little toy vending machines that are littered throughout the store:
There is also a sizable used clothing section on the first floor but I`ve never found it to be particularly photogenic.

Upstairs we go!

The gaming section, which takes up about half the space, I have covered here before so I`ll skip that in this post. The rest of the floor is taken up by Pachinko slot machines:
UFO Catchers:
A movie section complete with dedicated VHS cassette tape shelf:
Where you can buy a copy of Dirty Laundry for only 100 yen:
Vinyl records!!
Musical instruments!
Fishing equipment!!
More Pachinko slot machines (I think these were supposed to be the real money makers for them):
And last but not least Manga:
All in all, an impressive array of things. While a lot of other stores offer similar combinations of stuff for sale, I don`t think any of them came close to offering the shopping experience that Omocha Souko did simply because none of them are anywhere near as amibtiously and imaginatively designed and laid out. It is perhaps a bit hard to convey this in words and photos, but perhaps you sense what I am getting at.

Alas it could not last forever. In my next post I`ll examine the possible causes of the downfall of this magnificent store.

Related Posts
- Omocha Souko Part 1: The Greatest Retro Game Store Ever