Our 131st entry in this blog is our trip to Prince Shopping Plaza in Karuizawa, Nagano, Japan. This is everyone’s first time to visit this place. Our main purpose to visit Karuizawa is to experience snow. Yay! But before that, our first stop is this very wide shopping mall. This is located in front of the station where we get off from our 4-hour bus ride.

It looks like a hot day but it is actually freezing. The Karuizawa Prince Shopping Plaza is a huge, sprawling, very modern outlet shop in the mountain resort town of Karuizawa, only one hour by bullet train from Tokyo. But it took us 4 hours to reach here by bus. We opted to use bus because it is cheaper and we get to continue sleeping since we went out from the house early.

“The stylish, 26-hectare Karuizawa Prince Shopping Plaza comprises six blocks of stores divided overall into two sections east and west of Karuizawa Station, and has over 200 stores offering internationally famous clothing brands, as well as a restaurant section.” -https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-city-guides/karuizawa-prince-shopping-plaza

Ate Rei and Sai is not into shopping (yet). So they are happy with the restaurant and play area. This shopping mall was established in 1995, and is now by far the biggest factor drawing visitors to Karuizawa, and has therefore contributed greatly to Karuizawa’s popularity as more than just a haven for the leisured classes.

This mall has expanded 6 times since opening and there are about 220 shops. ‘Bulgari’, ‘Chloe’, ‘Zenia’, ‘Barneys New York’ opened In November 2008. You can find a lot of brands in this mall. It is also located very close to Prince Hotel and Prince Skiing Resort. So this place is really heaven for shoppers and snowboard/skii lovers.

Since it is just 2 days before Christmas, lots of illuminations and Christmas Trees are in the shopping mall. I have seen photos of this mall before pandemic and it was super illuminated with Christmas lights. They did not have much of that for now since a lot of shops are also affected by the coronavirus pandemic. But still, we enjoyed our visit. 🙂