Visiting Tokyo, Nakano Broadway ultra-short history

Named after the famous road of New York, Nakano Broadway was built in 1966 next to the JR Nakano Station. At the time, it was at the vanguard of modernization, being designed to host a complex of luxury residences and a mall with high class shops. By then, Nakano was an old, wooden house residential and agricultural district, and Nakano Broadway was placed to complement an existing commercial area, a quarter-kilometer long shopping street beginning right in front of the train station and ending at the mall entrance.

However, by the 1980s Nakano lost its luster, surpassed by the much more glamorous Shinjuku or Ikebukuro. Nakano Broadway started transforming into the flourishing manga-anime center that it is today in 1980, when the Mandarake company opened here its first second hand book store. Over the decades, the success of the book store attracted many other similar shops, and today Nakano Broadway is dominated by manga, anime and games stores, following Akihabara as the second otaku paradise in Tokyo.