Part of the pleasure of record hunting in Tokyo is the sheer difficulty of finding the shops. For the navigationally-challenged (like me)  the Japanese street-addressing system can take some getting used to. But it makes reaching your goal even more rewarding when you finally do. After almost an hour trawling Dogenzaka and finding only yakitori bars and love hotels, I located Lighthouse Records down the obligatory alleyway, up several flights of stairs and naturally in a completely different area to where I thought it would be.

Well worth the search though – great selection of House music old, new and all the in between varietals. They also stock Nagaoka carts and a selection of t-shirts and bags. Like many Japanese record shops most of the stock, secondhand or new, has small handwritten labels explaining what the record is, who produced it and so on. These are in Japanese of course but the key names are usually in English so it’s possible to find interesting things that you might have otherwise been unaware of.

Plus there’s Lighthouse’s impressive in-house sound system: Levinson amp, Klipschorn speakers and vintage Urei mixer.

3F Seijitsu Bldg. 2-9-2 Dogenzaka Shibuya-ku Tokyo 159-0043

Visited City Country City – a beautiful secondhand record shop in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo in December 2009. Lovingly curated selection of jazz, rock, soul, psych, disco and folk. If that’s not enough, it’s named after a WAR song and you can buy beer and food to sustain you as you browse.

The very friendly proprietor invited me to sign the wall but I didn’t think I was exactly up there with the folks who’d tagged it before…

Hear Now – one of Melbourne’s few remaining independent vinyl retailers – closed its doors in August 2009. A sad occurence for a number of reasons, not least because Hear Now was somewhere you could actually buy new vinyl. These places are becoming rarer – especially in Australia – and it’s sad to see a focal point in the local scene bow out.

Currently in Melbourne there is, by my calculation, only one independent retailer stocking any newly released 12 inch records you’d actually be interested in hearing, let alone buying. (Plenty of secondhand of course, but that’s another story.) So if you’re in the minority like me and a) don’t want to download and play digital files or b) would ideally prefer to buy from a shop you can walk into, you’re not left with many options.