Since November 2020, I’ve been trying to get my hands on a PlayStation 5. I finally succeeded over a year later—and that’s not due to lack of trying. If you’re in Japan and are still chasing this elusive white whale (or are just interested in everything I tried in order to get one), then maybe you’ll find this article helpful.
Raffles
When the PS5 released in Japan, it was only possible to get one online—retail stores by and large didn’t ever get any. Moreover, online sales didn’t tend to be first-come-first-serve. Rather they were raffles (where the winners would be announced days or even weeks later.
Now, more than a year later, the raffles continue. While the odds are most certainly not on your side, there’s always a chance you could win one. The real trick is figuring out which websites are doing raffles at any given moment.
For this, google is your best friend. The search string “PS5抽選販売” will get you the information. Recent news results from sites like Game Watch and Game*Spark will have lists of all the recent raffles going on—as well as articles whenever result mails are sent out (which can be helpful if you entered as many raffles as I did).
To enter these raffles, you’ll almost always need an account for the store’s website or you’ll need to download an app (or both). Sometimes, you’ll have to deal with extra rules—like needing to sign up for a newsletter or even having to have been a member since before the raffle was even announced.
Over the past year and change, I entered dozens upon dozens of these. Many didn’t even have the courtesy to send me a mail to let me know I didn’t win. And in the end, this isn’t how I got my PS5. No, I went another route entirely.
The Yodobashi Camera Credit Card
While retail stores didn’t get PS5s at launch, that isn’t necessarily true these days. Yodobashi Camera regularly gets shipments of PS5s sent to their stores in major cities. There’s just one catch. To buy one, you don’t just need to have a Yodobashi Camera point card, you need to have a Yodobashi Camera credit card: the Gold Point Card+.
Now, it doesn’t cost you anything to get this credit card, though, if you’re a foreigner like me, you might be turned down based on that alone (a well-known struggle among expats here in Japan). In the end, a Japanese friend of mine went out of their way, got themselves this card, and offered to go with me to buy a PS5 as a Christmas present. And honestly, it’s the best gift I’ve gotten in years.
Of course, having the credit card is just the first step. While Yodobashi Camera has a rule of one PS5 per credit card to combat scalpers, Yodobashi Camera staff are nonetheless not allowed to tell customers when PS5 shipments are due. This means it’s impossible to know for sure when any given store will get a shipment of PS5s in. However, that’s not to say you can’t make an educated guess.
Japanese netizens have come together and pooled their information on the site “Popular Game Get Navi.” Here you can see a history of which Yodobashi Camera stores got PS5 shipments and when (as well as at what times reservation tickets were distributed to the line of prospective buyers and when they ran out). From there, it’s possible to make a educated guess about when to go camp out in front of a store.
In my case, my aforementioned friend noticed that the Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara gets a PS5 shipment on either Saturday or Sunday on a weekly basis. In the past few months, there was only one time this wasn’t true. Therefore, after a Saturday where none were delivered, we knew that Sunday was our chance. We got up at 4:30 AM, hopped on a train into Tokyo, and lined up.
There was just one problem: Even arriving at 6:00 AM, we were 162 in line. In most cases, the number of units delivered to Akihabara is around 100. So, I feared we wasted our trip—and that the next weekend I would just have to camp out all night to get a good spot in line (and have my friend come join me in the morning for the actual purchase).
However, we got lucky: Yodobashi Akihabara got three times the normal number of units in preparation for Christmas. At about 6:30 AM, employees showed up and handed out reservation tickets (though no one left their spot in line) and shortly before the store opened at 9:30 AM we were ushered in and lined up once again as everyone made their purchase. An hour later, I was the proud owner of a PS5.
So, if you’re in Japan and the PS5 is proving to be endlessly illusive like it was for me, perhaps the information above will be some help to you. Happy hunting!
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