Records I keep — the storage solution I found, and the start of a memory tour

CDs are awkward objects.

A jewel case is 142mm × 125mm × 10mm. Each one is small. But put enough of them on a shelf, and they will quietly take over your room.

They were never worth buying a dedicated shelf for. But throwing them away was unthinkable. Each one was bought with pocket money or part-time wages clutched in hand, and each one has a memory stuck to it.

Five or six years ago, I packed mine into cardboard boxes and put them deep in a closet, where I left them, unopened, for a long time.

Moving to Tokyo, and a sudden CD boom

Rewind the clock to when I was eighteen.

I had just moved to Tokyo and started at a music vocational school. For some reason, my friends and I went all in on CDs.

We had no money, but somehow that didn’t stop us from walking into HMV and dropping the equivalent of two or three hundred dollars on imported CDs at a time. Standing at the new-release import racks, deciding this one from the cover art alone. Looking back, it was about half judging by the cover, half recommendations from friends.

And the budget compromise: TSUTAYA in Shibuya, where you could rent CDs by the stack. The selection back then was incredible — you could lose an hour just walking the Western-music shelves end to end.

Renting was a war, though. The disc had to make it into iTunes before the return date, or the rental was wasted. I'd come home, put off my school assignments, and start ripping discs into my MacBook — five to ten minutes per CD, several at once, music playing in the room until late at night.

Back then, music alone was enough to fill my days.

Years asleep in cardboard

I started working, got married, moved a few times. CDs slowly drifted out of daily life as streaming took over, and ended up packed into cardboard boxes in a closet.

Five, six years. Almost never opened.

But throwing them away was the one option I could never take. Heavy, in the way, untouched — and still, I couldn’t let them go.

The reorganization happened five or six years ago, when I finally decided to deal with them.

Finding the slim case

The first decision was the hard one: commit to removing the jewel cases.

Plastic cases take up an absurd amount of space relative to the disc and the booklet inside. Take that empty box out of the equation, and the whole storage problem changes scale.

What I landed on was a slim case from Elecom — model number CCD-DPC30BK, sold in a 30-pack. A thin, paper-jacket-style sleeve, one disc per pocket.

What mattered to me was that it could hold not just the disc, but the booklet, the back inlay (apparently this is the industry term for the back cover insert), and even the obi — the Japanese paper sash that wraps domestic releases.

The booklet is half of the experience. Lyrics, credits, artwork, photo inserts. I wasn’t willing to lose those just to save space.

After the swap, the total volume came down to about one fifth of what the jewel cases occupied — never measured, just my sense of it.

A 100-yen-shop CD box

The slim-cased CDs all went into a CD box from a 100-yen shop — Japan’s answer to dollar-store goods, where you can find nearly anything for ¥110.

Whichever 100-yen shop you go to, the box is roughly the same. Get the size right, and that's it. Today, that box sits in my closet, packed tight with the music of those years.

Opening it is a kind of time travel

Most days, I forget the box is there. But the moment I open it, time disappears.

I pull out one disc, put it on the player (these days, the MacBook), and open the booklet. Reading the lyrics. Then the credits — Produced by …, Mixed by … — and once that starts, I can’t stop.

"Wait, this producer also did that other band's album." "Didn't this guitarist put out a solo record?"

Threading my way through artist connections, I pull out another disc, and another. Listening to music while traveling on paper — that experience isn’t something a streaming-service recommendation can give you.

From the Shelf, starting here

I'm starting an occasional series called From the Shelf.

I'm not a critic. I never worked at a label. So I can't offer deep expertise.

What I want to do instead is this:

• Write so that someone of my generation can say "I have that one. Forgot about it."
• Look back at what I was thinking back then, the version of me who first put the disc in
• Talk not just about the album, but the store I bought it in, the season it played through, who was in the room

In a streaming-everything world, I want to spend a little time with the music I once owned as objects. If you’re up for it, I'd love for you to join me.

One disc at a time, out of the closet box. A small tour through the version of me who first heard them.

See you in the next one.