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Tips on Buying Secondhand Cameras in Japan
Want to buy a camera but find prices overwhelming? Secondhand camera shops are your friends!
I personally used to frequent a lot of ukay-ukay shops back in the Philippines — kind of the Filipino version of a thrift store, wherein secondhand clothes and factory overruns are sold at completely low prices. Unfortunately, there aren't that many shops selling secondhand items that aren't clothes or ones that are still in good shape. A reason for this, I believe, is that when Filipinos use items, they use them until the very end of their lifespan, when they're completely worn or mangled beyond recognition (case in point: I know so many people, including myself, who would only throw out shoes once the soles are completely worn off). That, or they're just handed over to relatives or friends, or friends of friends until the cycle ends.
Here in Japan though, secondhand shops still have a pretty good reputation, with a lot of the products being sold there still in good condition even after years of use. Somehow, this might be attributed to Japan's concept of もったいない (mottainai) of not letting items go to waste.
Why buy secondhand items?
"One man's trash is another man's treasure" is a proven concept here. Sometimes, I would even see people leave their furniture or other household items still in good condition near the apartment's elevator and label it so that anyone who wants it could freely get the items for themselves. In some secondhand buy and sell sites like Jimoty, you can even get appliances for free or for really cheap prices since the owners just want to get rid of them but don't want the item to go to waste.
When it comes to secondhand shops, quality control is a lot stricter. A lot of the secondhand items sold-especially the ones in physical stores-are inspected and rated according to the store's internal product system. For online shops, users would usually post photos of the item from different angles and add descriptions of the product's state and quality to assure the buyers of the item.
In a lot of the brick-and-mortar secondhand shops that I've been to, the items have labels in front of them, containing the item name/model, equivalent rank…
