Kitamura (カメラのキタムラ) is one of the biggest camera chains in Japan — the red logo is everywhere, from shopping streets to malls. Most Kitamura stores are ordinary camera shops. The one in Akihabara is different: it is a used-and-junk floor on the 4th floor of an office building, and the landmark that gets you there is a TAX FREE sign.
I visited on August 1, 2026, as part of a day spent walking around used camera shops in Akihabara. It got one short section in my Akihabara camera shop guide. This article is that section, expanded.
What this place actually is
The official name is 秋葉原中古買取センター — roughly, “Akihabara Used Camera Buying Center.” The 買取 (kaitori) part means this is a place where the chain buys used gear from people. The sign at the entrance lists three services: used camera sales, new cameras, and repair reception. For a visiting photographer, the interesting one is the first.
Set your expectations correctly before you go up: most of the stock here is junk grade. Fungus and haze are common, and the prices are on the low side to match. This is not a showroom of clean collector pieces — it is a junk floor, run with a big chain’s sense of order. If the Japanese meaning of “junk” is new to you, my guide to buying junk cameras in Japan explains how the whole system works.
Finding it: follow the TAX FREE sign
The shop is in the Hasegawa Building at 10 Kanda-Matsunagacho, about 2–3 minutes on foot from Akihabara Station’s Showa-dori exit. The tricky part is the entrance: the shop is not at street level, and the corridor that leads to the elevator is easy to walk past. The TAX FREE sign in the photo above is the marker — when you see it, you are in the right corridor. Take the elevator up to the 4th floor.
This is a pattern in Akihabara: a lot of the camera shops here hide on upper floors of ordinary buildings, and if you only trust street-level shop windows, you will miss most of them. Kitamura might be the best example — a nationwide chain, and you can still walk straight past it.
The colored stickers that tell you when an item arrived
Here is my favorite detail of the shop. Each item carries a colored sticker showing the month it arrived. When I visited, July arrivals had a blue sticker and older stock had a red one.
No other shop on my Akihabara route that day did this, and it is genuinely useful in two directions. You can spot the fresh arrivals — the shelves that are worth checking first. And you can see when something has been sitting for a while, which is worth knowing before you pay for it. It is the kind of small organizational touch you would expect from a big chain, applied to a junk floor where you would not expect it at all.
The price tags: an English guide, with one catch
The shop posts an English guide to reading its price tags. It shows you the layout: the price is written here, the condition note is written there. If you have ever stood in a Japanese shop staring at a tag full of characters you cannot read, you know how welcome that is.
The catch: the condition notes themselves are written in Japanese only. So the guide tells you where the condition is written, but not what it says. You end up knowing exactly which part of the tag you cannot read.
Two of my articles fill that gap. How to read Japanese price tags covers the words that appear on tags like these, and my guide to Japanese camera condition grades explains the ranking systems shops use. Load them on your phone before you go up the elevator, and the Japanese-only notes become much less of a wall.
Tax-free, UnionPay, and who was shopping
Tax-free shopping and credit cards were both OK on my visit. You can see how ready the shop is for international customers before you even reach the elevator: the entrance sign says “KITAMURA CAMERA TAX FREE” in English, and next to it there is a UnionPay welcome sign in Chinese. This floor expects visitors from overseas.
And it gets them. On my visit, about half of the shoppers around me were from overseas. They were checking Olympus cameras and Nikon COOLPIX compacts, phones out, looking things up while they browsed. Nobody seemed lost — the floor works fine without Japanese.
I am not going to explain the tax-free paperwork rules here, because they depend on your situation and they change — confirm the details at the register. If you want the bigger picture of which Tokyo camera shops handle tax-free and cards, I keep a quick-reference article for that.
Practical notes, and who this floor is for
- Location: Hasegawa Building, 10 Kanda-Matsunagacho — about 2–3 minutes from Akihabara Station’s Showa-dori exit. Elevator to the 4th floor.
- Hours: the entrance sign on my visit said 10:30–19:30, open every day except January 1–2. Hours change, so please check the official Kitamura site before you go.
- Condition: junk grade is the default here. Expect fungus and haze on many items, and check everything carefully before you buy.
- Summer: it was 37°C (99°F) on my visit. An air-conditioned 4th floor is a break as well as a shop — bring water for the walk.
So who should come here? Someone who wants cheap junk hunting with a little order around it. The arrival stickers tell you what is fresh, the tag guide tells you where to look, and the register handles tax-free — that combination makes this one of the easier junk floors in Tokyo for a first-timer. On my day it was one stop among six; if you want the full route with rest stops built in, it is in my one-day Akihabara itinerary.
Everything above is what I saw on August 1, 2026. Stock, hours and services change, so please check before you go.
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