In Store

If you are a fan of Japanese anime, or if you adore Godzilla and all he has wrought, this Northgate shop might be your paradise.

Photography by Greg Plumis

Kicks Hobby Japan sits unassumingly in one of Northgate’s gridlocked strip malls, between a smoke shop and an Indonesian café. It’s a unique, jumbled jewel box of a shop, heaped with Japanese toys and models based on anime, the art form that remained underground in the U.S. until the Internet helped popularize it in the 1990s.

Among Kicks’ top-selling products, says owner Jose Mejino, are toys based on Gundam, a longstanding Japanese TV series concerning a group of giant robots and their struggles. Stacks of these models, with their juicy, baffling names, fill the store’s center aisle: Justice Gundam, Gundam Doublex, Meteor Unit Seed Destiny, Spacy Prototype Multipurpose Mobile Suit.

“Gundam models are great for kids, because they can put them together themselves and have an exact copy of their favorite robot, but they’re great for older collectors too, because they like to custom-paint them and create their own color schemes,” says Mejino, who was once a regular customer at Kicks. He began working there while studying Japanese at UW, then bought the place from its original owner in 2007. He’s the perfect anime toy store owner, avidly reading up on the newest shows, eager to know what customers favor, happy to describe cartoons’ plots in detail.

On monitors at the rear of the room, anime rolls continuously — anything from Index, a new Japanese TV series about a high school boy who discovers he has magic powers, to Yuyuhakushow, about the travails of a ghost. Plastic likenesses of Godzilla and Baby Godzilla stand, jaws wide, on a shelf above the cash register. Loyal customers gather near the front counter, discussing the products.

“He comes with a gigantic sword, really awesome,” one young customer points out to another, referring to a buff plastic figure.

Mejino says, “You know, if somebody’s a fan of something, they really want a concrete representation of it. It’s human nature to collect things.”

Kicks Hobby Japan
Jose Mejino, Owner
543 NE Northgate Way
206.306.9060
Tuesday – Saturday: 12:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Sunday: 11:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Closed Monday