55th World Used Camera Fair Runs Through September 9 at Matsuya Ginza
Twelve dealers took over the eighth floor of Matsuya Ginza on September 4, and they clear out on September 9 at five in the afternoon. The I.C.S. Imported Camera Society has been running this fair twice a year, once in winter and once in autumn, and this is the 55th edition. The February one closed on March 2. If you happen to be in Tokyo this week, the eighth floor is open from 11:00 to 20:00, until 19:30 on the Sunday, and only until 17:00 on the final day.
The exhibitor list is the reason to care: Akasaka Camera, Kikuya Shoji, Sankyo Camera, JW, Shuko, Sukiya Camera, National Fort, Hayata Camera, Photobelleze, Fujikoshi Camera, Penguin Camera and Yagura Camera. Those are shops scattered across Tokyo (and beyond it), each with its own opening hours, its own neighbourhood, its own stock quirks. Visiting them properly is a multi-day project. Here they’re twenty metres apart, which means you can put the same body in your hands at four different tables inside ten minutes and watch the asking prices spread out in front of you. That’s price discovery you cannot get from a screen.
The headline stock is what gets written up. Camera Yamagen is bringing a near-mint Fujifilm GX617 set with four lenses and the original steel case at ¥1,540,000, plus a Leica M4 Black Chrome, a silver Nikon FM2 in like-new shape, and a Konica Hexar HX-14. Fine. Those are collector items, they’ll sell to collectors, and photographs of them will circulate for a week.
The cheap tables are the ones that matter
If you shoot adapted glass, the interesting inventory is the stuff nobody photographs. Manual-focus primes in mounts whose bodies died thirty years ago sit in trays at prices that reflect the dead bodies rather than the optics. Nikon F, M42, Contax/Yashica, Olympus OM, Minolta MD: every one of those adapts to a mirrorless body for the cost of a cheap ring, and every one of those is priced as an orphan in Japan because the domestic market has moved on. The last fair had a Nikon EM on a table for ¥7,700 with a hairline crack in the accessory shoe. That is the register we’re talking about at the bottom end.
Japanese dealers also grade conservatively. A body listed with a cosmetic fault is usually a body with exactly that fault and nothing else hiding behind it, which is not something you can assume from an overseas listing. Being able to open the aperture, rack the focus, and hold the front element up to the hall lights is worth more than any grading scale.
So: check the aperture blades for oil, check the front and rear groups for haze under a light rather than against a wall, look into the barrel for the faint web of fungus at the edge of an element, and turn the focus ring end to end. Helicoid grease that’s gone stiff is fixable but rarely worth fixing on a ¥15,000 lens. Separation shows as a coloured rainbow edge inside a cemented group, and it kills the lens. Take a small torch.
The mount you should be careful with
Canon FD is the trap. The tables are full of it, the prices look wonderful, and there is no sane way to adapt FD to a modern mirrorless body without an optical element in the path that costs you sharpness and a stop of light. Buy FD because you want to shoot an FD body, not because you plan to put it on an R-mount camera. Everything else on that list is a flat ring and correct infinity focus.
One practical note on entry. The advance lottery was only for the opening rush on September 4 and September 6, held at the first-floor main entrance. For the remaining days you walk in from any entrance once the store is open, take the lift to eight, and start at the back of the hall where the crowd is thinner.
Six days a year, twice a year, one floor. The next one lands in February.