December 28, 2012
It was raining when we reached the Gotemba Premium Shopping Outlet from hell mountain. It has two hundred ten retail outlets of luxury items which include Balenciaga, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bally, Salvatorre Ferragamo, among others.
It’s too bad that Miwako only gave us one and a half hours time to go around and shop. Gotemba is sprawling with West and East sections and just to find the toilet already consummes 10 minutes. One has to cross a bridge to get from the East to the West. You can easily spend one whole day here. But given a limited time to shop, the trick is to identify which stores you want to prioritize before you even get-off the bus. You can only see two or three depending on how experienced you are in speed-shopping.
We were not deterred by the imposed time limit, the nagging cold and rain.
Gucci
Bottega Veneta
St. John couture
The Jimmy Choo boutique in Gotemba has more selections than their store in Hongkong located on the ground floor of the Ocean Park terminal behind Marco Polo Gateway.
I wanted to try on shoes but there’s no time.
The retail prices here are also a lot less expensive
Bally
Not all stores offer big discounts. Depending on the item and the brand, you can get 50 percent off or no discount at all just like in YSL. They don’t even give back the 5 percent tax refund.
YSL P1.5M
I saw plates at Royal Copenhagen, Wedgwood, etc. but there was simply no time to look at all the nice merchandise. It would also be very difficult to bring home heavy porcelain.
I did manage to buy myself a few little things from the Laura Ashley store:
Gotemba Premium Outlets
1321 Fukasawa
Gotemba-Shi
Shizuoka, Japan
(about 1.5 – 2 hrs. from Metropolitan Tokyo, open daily except on the 3rd thursday of February)
