Business is booming at the camera shop managed by Hiroaki Kitahara, but he has a sense of emptiness regarding the past and is worried about the future.
His major secondhand shop in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, is an outlet of Fujiya Camera Co., and it has seen a rush of customers buying Nikon cameras and lenses immediately after the world's top camera maker announced Jan. 13 it is terminating most of its prestigious lineup of film-based cameras to concentrate on the digital variety.
"We've received more than 10 times the orders for Nikon products than in an average month," Kitahara said in a telephone interview Friday. "Window cases of (Nikon products) are now almost empty."