The Best Shop in Shinjuku

I've got a pretty selective memory. I'm crap with birthdays. No Grandma, I can't remember when D-day is and telephone numbers? Forget it!

I wasn't even confident that the shop was in Shinjuku. It could have been in Ginza which is probably better known for shops. But I remembered Shinjuku when I walked out of the train station. I remembered walking down the hill with the tower of department stores on my right (now the biggest UniQlo I have ever seen) and the sushi places under the railway bridge. I remember the wide crossing across the mental road.

I remember it being stupid-busy, like now, and also stinking hot. Advertisers hand out promotional 'uchiha' fans - I get one with a green gorilla on it and gratefully waft myself with it. After a brief accidental detour in which I pass a lot of ramen and tonkatsu shops and buy a few mystery-flavour riceballs to tie me over, I wind up on the street I want. I remember it isn't this street, but another street round the back of this one somewhere.

I try my luck round a few corners. I can see the limits of the street which means that there is at least a perimeter where this shop exists. Go me for being logical.

I decide that I've been walking around in the heat a little too long and must rejuvinate with an ice coffee. I duck into a busy basement shop full of cigarette smoke and hurridly slurp one down. When I emerge, the glare of the sun illuminates the sign of the building opposite. I'm standing outside it! - damn my blind air conditioning and beverage lust!

I dance around all the displays like a gleeful child. I look at the beautiful postcards and Japanese print style letter kits; the moomin-themed stationary, the animal-shaped corrector pens, the multi-coloured folders, the rubber stamps, the patterned sellotapes, the origami sheets, the character notebooks and the millions and millions of different pens.

Sekaido has 7 floors of stationary. Every type of stationary you can imagine. And
I am a celebrated stationary perv!

After my gleeful dance of the first floor I prance up to the second, which sells all the manga supplies and I have a small neopiko pen and screentone binge (these things tend to be hideously expensive or hard to find back home). There's some serious kit up here which makes me think seriously about drawing manga again.

After a good hour of dancing up and down the escalators in a cloud of excited manga sparkles, I have to backtrack and pay for my postcards that I've accidently robbed from downstairs. As with most department stores in Japan you must pay for your purchases on each floor before progressing to the next.

As I walk back into the disgusting heat with my nicely wrapped purchases I feel a great sense of achievement. I, alone and unaided by persons or smartphones, being of shockingly bad memory and sense of direction have found a shop that I went to once, four years ago, in the middle of Japan.

And it was still as awesome as I remembered.