Record Shopping in Tokyo, and a picture from August 1987

Tito went record shopping more weekends than not during the length of his stay in Japan. It was a very different experience compared to shopping back home in multiple ways. The stores tended to be cramped with narrow aisles between record and CD bins. There also seemed to be two types of record shops. One carried mainly domestic (Japanese) releases and the other was much broader in scope and had the Western artists that he and I favored. The small-ish neighborhood that he lived in (Kita-senju) only had the type of shops that focused on Japanese music so he traveled further afield to the bitter shopping districts to look for collectible goodies for both of us.

During one such sojourn to Shibuya, he took his brother along and had him take photos for me to see what sort of circumstances he was operating in. I couldn't read anything, but he did his best to describe the scenes in the pictures on his cassette tapes to me. One thing he told me was that some shops had a large number of promotional posters for new releases. He learned enough Japanese to request one of these posters when making a purchase and started up a large collection for both of us. The items that flowed between us were more than just material objects. They were ways of connecting our experiences at a distance.

This is one of the pictures that he sent me showing him standing on an overpass holding some of the booty from the day's efforts.