Queens no Family Market

I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I had always heard rumblings of such a thing, and even started to nickname the Broadway station area of Astoria as Shin-Nihon, but nothing could have prepared me for this.

These pictures are accurate: you are looking at the only Japanese convenience store in New York City. As you can see, Family Market is a sort of take off of FamilyMart, although the products are somewhat different. Family Market functions as sort of a small import shop for Japanese goods in the area for the homesick Japanese who live around there, and there are a lot.

When you walk in you are greeted with shouts of “irashaimase!” (welcome in Japanese) and will be hard pressed to move around with saying “sumimasen” (excuse me). The Japanese themselves fill the area much like the Coca-Cola in your bottle does. According to my friend, in her house, which holds six rentable rooms, there were only Japanese until about a month ago, and now 4 still remain. In addition, the streets, stores, and garbage scream Japanese, literally. My friend says you can hear drunken Japanese roaming the streets at night and I got a bag of Japanese potato chips stuck to my sneaker on the way home.

So what does this mean to you? Well, are you looking for Japanese TV shows on video (without subtitles of course), Japanese fashion magazines, beer or Calorie Mate? Then this is the place to be. Horny guys looking for Japanese girlfriends because they like anime or have an Asian fetish need not apply.


Wisdom of the Day: Sometimes you have to take the subway back a station to get ahead.