Day 2: The most famous beetle shop in all of Nakano

Nakano, just one stop from Shinjuku on the JR Chuo line, is one of my favorite places to take out-of-towners for shopping at the wonderful SunMall – a dank rabbit warren of maid cafes, anime shops, creepy toy and figurine stores, an alternative bookstore,  and of course the shop that only sells things that people left on trains.

Its also one of Tokyo’s gayest neighborhoods.

But today I was going there for a different reason: a beetle shop. Collecting beetles in the summertime is a favorite tradition for Japanese children. Most people here have treasured memories of scouring the countryside with nets as youngsters for a prized “rhinoceros beetle”, so much so that in the Summer months they sell beetle-nabbing nets  in 7-11s. And of course, it has become a big business. The rarest and most precious beetles, called “six-legged black diamonds” go for over 100,000 yen ( or a thousand US dollars).  Importers have been accused of raping the forests of India and Nepal as villagers clearcut rainforest trees, only to get at the beetles nesting at their tops.

And where to buy these beetles? In this shop in Nakano, so famous that it advertises at the train station:

The beetles, were indeed, huge – and the whole shop had a weird humid smell ….

Outside was a statue on the pavement of a unicorn-eagle:

From here it was just a two-minute hop to neighboring Koenji. Koenji is like this cool little innercity Harakuju that most foreigners don’t know about. A vast arcade runs under the train tracks, and marching off it are a warren of alleyways and pedestrian streets, densely packed with funky vintage stores and boutiques, hipster inner city kids, long-haired noseringed hippies, rock dive clubs, jazz bars, art bars, offbeat bookshops, cheap clothes, funky clothes, a drunk African dude, a kabuki ? or Chinese opera? performer in full make-up doing his grocery shopping, and this :