Major Bookstore Discovery: Junkudo

I have been living in Japan for almost two years now and exactly two weeks before I leave, I found what is perhaps Tokyo’s best non-used bookstore for academic nerds. Many friends have told me that there is a great bookstore in Ikebukuro (池袋) and I thought I had found it long ago. There is a nice multi-story bookstore near the station but yesterday I realized they were all referring to a completely different 9 floor bookstore: the ジュンク堂書店 (本店）. It is not far from the south exit, closest to the 西武池袋駅. The store has lots of academic books and like many Japanese bookstores, their in-store search engine (on each floor) is great (you can quickly print out lots of little book detail slips). History and philosophy (my favorites, as always) are both on the 4th floor. The philosophy section also has lots of English books (with separate sections divided into “analytical” philosophy, “post-structuralist”, and “Japanese thought” – we could have an interesting discussion just about this division itself). What is different about this store is that they keep in stock a lot of huge collections of 資料 which usually have to be ordered, and some of the more obscure history books that would never make it to regular bookstores (though usually only very recently published ones).