Nakano is perhaps Tokyo’s most underrated tourist hangout. Sure, everybody goes to Shinjuku and Shibuya yet Nakano is only 5 minutes away on the Chuo line, with a funky vibe. It is slightly under-the-radar and residential with a charming mix of people – a big gay contingent, students and young hipsters living in tiny onebedroom apartments who want to be near where the action is, plus quite a lot of elderly. As a result it is cute and very traditional in places, and grungily hip in others. A great place to walk around in.
I’ve blogged before about the attractions of Nakano before ; here about an interesting local park and here about a beetle shop, but of course the great, unmissable attraction is the SunMall and Broadway arcade. The long arcade starts opposite the station’s North exit and bustles with funky little local shops selling socks, or rice crackers, or really cheap clothes, before ending in the SunMall. This weird, dan, four-storey complex is stuffed to the brim with shops selling cosplay outfits and rubber monsters, hugely expensive dolls with shaved heads (creepy!!!) and used comic books and games machines and guns and alien replicas. On the top floor are a shop selling great souvenir Tshirts, an avant-garde bookshop and a fossils store. Two of my favorite places – the shop that only sold things people left on the subway, and the gay comic book shop – seem to have closed down, but who knows what could have replaced them? I think this is truly one of the few places that every visitor to Tokyo should experience. And in the streets around the Sunmall I also discovered a pyramid:
This herbalist shop patronised by Taiwanese-Japanese movie star Takeshi Kaneshiro (there are pictures of him everywhere in it) which seems to use ingredients from endangered animals like the pangolin:
A street of bars like these ones:
The world’s smallest rock climbing salon;
And finally Tokyo’s (and perhaps the world’s) only Ainu restaurant, serving food from Japanese indigenous Ainu people. Dasiuke and I met uop with friends Tomomi and Asako to try it out. The food was so-so to be honest; I had what was described as venison on the menu but turned out to be a few small pieces of meat ina mound of moyashi, and the cramped dining room wasn’t hugely comfortable. But the gregarious Ainu owner performed traditional Ainu music and dancing for us (and in fact, he made us do an Ainu ” thank you dance” before we could leave the establishment) which made it a fun night.
