When the four floors of the Nakano Broadway shotengai opened for business in October 1966, resident retailers went for a high-class image in the hopes of attracting a wealthy clientele.
Well-to-do customers did visit from the luxury condos located directly above the shopping center in western Tokyo, which is named after the famous boulevard in far-away New York City.
But locals from Nakano Ward, many still working vegetable plots for a living at the time, didn't know what to make of all the men's haberdashers and other fancy Western-style boutiques.
"Little old ladies parked their wooden clogs at the door, they were so worried about dirtying the floor," said Keisuke Muramiya, a hair stylist at Broadway for some 30 years who serves as vice chairman of the Federation of Broadway Shopping-Center Committees. "The neighborhood never took to it."
As a result, high-end enterprises dropped away by half before the 1991 implosion of Japan's economic bubble made matters even worse, opening up space for much humbler successors such as stores selling cheap clothes for women of a certain age, discounted electronics and second-hand clothing from the United States. Pretension turned to shabbiness.
Broadway desperately needed something to distinguish it from all the other struggling shotengai across Tokyo, a new sense of character.
Or make that characters, plural -- namely the young Tokyoites who started flocking to those vintage clothing shops in search of stylishly rag-tag accoutrements, in so doing remaking Broadway into a mecca for retro-cool. Recalls Muramiya: "A subculture emerged."
Meanwhile, another yet more colorful line-up of characters was also helping spur Broadway's revival. There were, for example, Atom Boy, Hello Kitty and even Godzilla . . . along with all the other stars of Japanese manga and related pop culture.
As the Broadway attracted a younger set, it likewise became an ideal place to sell manga, and in 1980 a tiny used-comics shop called Mandarake opened on the third floor.
Mandarake struck a vein of strong demand and before long opened a constellation of booths on other floors at Broadway -- and around Japan -- catering to fans of every Japanese pop-culture niche. And as manga and anime expanded globally, so did Nakano Broadway's reputation among ardent overseas fans.
Sprinkled haphazardly among Broadway's 330 or so stores, 19 separate Mandarake stores today offer comic books; anime videos; laser disks; DVDs; electronic games; plastic action figures; "cosplay" costumes for people who like to dress up as high-school girls, spaceship hostesses and what have you; and "adult-oriented" manga targeted at both male and female customers.
Broadway's eclectic mix of goods and services (the cosplay shop shares the fourth floor with a real-estate agent and a dentist) attracts some 30,000 visitors a day, about double the level a decade ago, according to an estimate by the shopping-center federation. On weekends, the number rises much higher.
That being the case, Broadway offers stiff competition to Japan's other fantasy mega-market, the Akihabara shopping district across town in Chiyoda Ward.
And nowadays, with anime and manga gaining broader social acceptance (that is, when risque material is factored out) teens aren't the only ones fueling sales.
"I'm thrilled to be here," said a beaming 30-year-old writer who gave his first name as Katsumasa. "Everything I wanted when I was a kid, now I can get it here."
