Games Workshop: Tokyo

As mentioned in last week's post, I had the chance to stop by the GW store while in Japan!

Here I am, re-working this post at 3:30 in the morning, thanks to jetlag! I got in tuesday evening (six hours BEFORE I left Tokyo -- wrap your heads around that one, kids) and as usual, the jetlag got me.

It's always interesting to see how the hobby differs from country to country. The store, located in a huge nerd mecca called Nakano Broadway, like all things in Tokyo, is small. While most GW shops are not large, this one is about half the size of most single man shops.

Still, the manager, Takeshi, pictured here helping a customer, makes the most of what he has, and the space offers a full selection of products from fantasy and LOTR to 40K. There's even room for a hobby station and smaller, "teaching" table.

What's most fun, though, is to look at the small differences. Here's the starter set, Dark Vengeance, in Japanese. It's written in Katakana, one of two Japanese alphabets, used to show foreign words or phrases. So instead of using the Japanese words for "dark" and "vengeance", it literally sounds out the words phonetically, sounding something like, "Dakku Benjyansu".

If you're curious about the cost, it retails for 13,800 yen, which comes out to about $115 US.

One of our posters, Darian, asked me to grab a Blood Angels codex in Japanese. When I asked Takeshi for this, he informed me that many of the newer books are NOT translated into Japanese, and showed me the codexes.

Look at the bottom of the image, the Blood Angels book, along with several of the newer codices, are in fact, in english only! Can you imagine trying to play your favorite army using a new rule set in a different language?! I also noticed that the weekly White Dwarf magazine is in english only, but Visions is the Asian version, using Japanese, Chinese and English (for Australia).

It's not all bad, though. Here's something only Asia gets - the rules, in the smaller format only included in the Stormclaw set everywhere else, sold separately! That's right, they can purchase either the large format, or small format rules. Wish that was an option here!

So, a special thanks to Takeshi, who is always cool to me when I stop by, and we'll see you all next post!

- trip