Nakano Broadway 中野ブロードウェイ
It started out upmarket in 1966; in 1980 it was saved by a second-hand bookshop of two tsubo.
Opened in 1966 as a luxury shopping centre (the singer Kenji Sawada lived there), it went into crisis when the big Shinjuku hubs took its customers away. It was saved by a second-hand bookshop of just two tsubo, opened on the second floor in 1980: Mandarake. From then on, and above all after the 1991 bubble, the building became the centre of Japanese subculture, what people call ‘the Akihabara of collecting’: over two hundred shops on five floors, from old manga to original animation cels and rare figures, and vintage material linked to countless series.
Tokyo
Nakano, Ochiai
