When Christina and I traveled to Aomori in January 2025, we visited a Hard Off (a popular chain of second-hand goods shops) and spent half a day there 1.
There were a few things that caught my eye:
But one of the items I eventually picked up was a silver iPhone 5 for ~$20 USD.
This iPhone was released in 2012, so it's been more than a decade. I wanted to use it for picture-taking 2. Here are some of the photos I've been sitting on, straight from the camera:
The following September, Christina and I flew to Japan again to see some friends and also attend the Osaka Expo.
And this past summer, we made another trip to see family and friends.
You can find the uncompressed versions of these photos here. I think these look much better than the photos I take with my newer iPhone. I don't really care about how high fidelity my photos turn out. The colors and minimal processing of these appeal much more to me.
Eventually, I want to use this iPhone 5 for a project I've been putting off for a few years now. I can only do it when I'm back home in Singapore though. I was there in May but working remotely and dealing with visa renewal hassles. I'll probably take some time off the next time I visit and finally start the project up again.
The good thing about visiting Hard Off in places like Aomori instead of more metropolitan/dense cities like Tokyo is that you can often find more things and for cheaper. 
A quirk of Japanese iPhones is that the shutter sound cannot be turned off. This is a good measure to prevent nefarious picture-taking, but I found it annoying so I jailbroke mine and deleted some shutter.wav file to disable it. Newer iPhones don't have this problem as they can use GPS to turn it off when outside of Japan.