Masaru Ono doesn’t know how he will feel when he closes the doors of RECOfan Shibuya BEAM, the iconic Tokyo record store he has managed for the past 20 years, for the final time at 9 p.m. on Sunday.
“I’ve got a lot of memories here,” Ono says, as he surveys the rows of shelves and cardboard boxes stuffed with records and CDs, less than a month before the store’s last day of business on Oct. 11. “We’re working toward the end now but it’s difficult to imagine how I’ll feel when it actually comes. For the time being, I’m just concentrating on holding it all together.”
RECOfan Shibuya has been a fixture of Tokyo’s record store scene since it opened in 1994, and is known by music fans across Japan and around the world as a treasure trove of mostly used vinyl and CDs. The sprawling, windowless store is located on the fourth floor of the BEAM building a short distance from Shibuya Station, and stocks around 300,000 records and roughly the same number of CDs, spanning a mind-boggling range of genres.