Japan's Seller's Market in Geiger Counter

In Tokyo’s bustling Akihabara electronics district, one of the hottest products isn’t a new game console or tablet computer. It’s a Geiger counter, sold under Shanghai Ergonomics Detecting Instrument’s DP802i brand name, that costs ¥65,000 ($800). That’s double the price tag in China. And unlike units sold on the mainland, the models hawked in Tokyo come without a box, warranty, or return policy.

Because of worries about radioactive contaminants since the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in March, Geiger counters, which measure radiation levels, have sold out even as prices have quadrupled in Tokyo. That stiff demand, says Shanghai Ergonomics Chairman Li Jinglei, has spurred a gray market of products built in makeshift Chinese factories that sometimes use faulty parts and shoddy designs or are simply fakes. Li says his Shanghai company has tested some of the new devices, also known as dosimeters, that have arrived on the market recently and found some that aren’t hermetically sealed or that stopped functioning within two or three days. He estimates a failure rate of about 70 percent. He doesn’t even know how the unboxed Geiger counters made by his company are getting to Japan, since Shanghai Ergonomics doesn’t sell them there itself, although some of its agents and distributors do.