Opened in 1996 on the site of a disused factory, with a canal running through the middle.
The artificial canal cuts right through the complex, and on the stage facing it (the Sunplaza) magic shows, concerts and, at weekends, television filming follow one another almost every day. Anyone who goes in to shop ends up stopping to watch. It was designed by Jon Jerde, the American architect of Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and Namba Parks in Osaka.
A shopping complex in Hakata opened in 1996 around an artificial canal, with shops, hotels, a theatre and a cinema on five levels around an open-air space.
ℹ️ Shops 10:00–21:00, restaurants until 23:00; the cinema has its own hours. The green-covered East Building, which appears in one of the shots, was demolished in 2023: that corner is no longer recognisable. The cinema toilet drawn in the manga has also been closed, and the corridor behind it blocked off.
🚉 Nakasu-Kawabata · 10 min walk
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Seventh volume, pages 57–76: Takafumi and Uncle come here by bus to see, at the cinema, the sequel to the film rented on DVD. You can recognise the pedestrian crossing at the Hakata-keisatsusho-iriguchi junction, the cathode-ray-tube televisions of the Center Walk (still switched on today), the United Cinemas Canal City 13 screen on the fourth floor, the entrance to the toilets with the ceiling on which the manga draws only the hemisphere and not the witch with the cat that is really there, the South Building escalator from behind whose pillar Sawae spies on them, and the entrance to the Nitori where Takafumi discovers he can use transformation magic.
Sources: hamutane.com · ja.wikipedia.org
Nearby
Kawabata Shōtengai300 mphoto by そらみみ · CC BY-SA 4.0
Kushida Jinja (Hakata Gion Yamakasa)400 mphoto by そらみみ · CC BY-SA 4.0
Hakata Machiya Furusato-kan500 mphoto by Hirho · CC BY-SA 4.0
Nakasu and Tenjin Yatai700 mphoto by Hirho · CC BY-SA 4.0