Tokyo

Shopping

Tokyo stores bring the goods of the world home to the domestic market. At the fashionable shops of the Ginza, Harajuku, Aoyama, and Shibuya, discerning Tokyoites can procure the clothing and merchandise of designers from London, Paris, New York, and of course Tokyo. Large, well-supplied department stores can be found throughout the city, like Tokyu, Seibu, and Parco in Shibuya, and Keio, Mitsukoshi, and Isetan in Shinjuku. Ikebukuro is the location of the Tobu department store, which promotes itself as the world's largest.

Certain areas of Tokyo specialize in particular lines of merchandise. Akihabara, for example, is an electronics market and is the first place to sell the latest offerings from Japan's unsurpassable electronics industry. Nearby Kanda, in the vicinity of Meiji University, has some 100 shops specializing in secondhand books. Kanda also has a concentrated area of sporting goods stores.

Wherever one shops, and whatever one shops for, one thing is universal throughout Tokyo and all of Japan: high-quality, attentive service from Japanese merchants. In this regard, the invariably helpful and polite proprietor of the smallest shop is in no way out-done by even the most expensive boutique in the Ginza or the larger department stores of Shibuya and Shinjuku, with their "greeters" at the doors and their abundant sales personnel.