Akihabara has long been considered Tokyo’s anime town. As the otaku circles grew from the tech-filled tinkering of the post-war electric town, the city bustled with the excitement of a growing and ever-evolving medium long into the turn of the century. Put your finger to the air, however, and you’ll see the wind is changing. Nowadays, all eyes are on Ikebukuro.
Ikebukuro has always had its place in anime and otaku fandom. However, as shonen megahits, slice-of-life comedies, and mecha hits ruled the roost, lighting up the billboards, arcades and alleyways of a more testosterone-fueled Akihabara, Ikebukuro catered more heavily towards female fans of anime. Most notably, the so-called Otome Road was a haven for fans interested in boys-love and yaoi, as well as anything with a similar target demographic.
While never reaching the same size and scale, Ikebukuro’s dedicated corner of anime stores ran complementary to broader city life. Animate’s origins come not from the so-called anime capital of Tokyo but Ikebukuro, with the company’s flagship original store opening in the city in the early 1980s. It was a small store that admittedly struggled in its early days. Even then, merch was more focused towards hits of the time geared to men like Macross and Urusei Yatsura that brought a skewed male demographic to the store.
As anime grew and became more diverse, so did the clientele. With Akihabara gaining its reputation as an anime hub more geared towards male fans, stores that catered to female fans would set up home in Ikebukuro. Around the turn of the century, a major refurbishment of the Ikebukuro Animate store also repositioned itself as a place dedicated to goods for female fans, further cementing this reputation. This rapid growth of stores targeted more specifically to female fans, to the point that adjacent stores centered on cosplay and even a butler cafe opened in the area, helped the street that compartmentalized most of these stores to earn the Otome Road nickname as it became the female counterbalance to Akihabara.
The city’s large shopping mall also helped incubate this dedicated fandom. Sunshine City is one of the largest malls in central Tokyo, a welcome reprieve with plenty on offer beyond its many clothing and entertainment stores. It has a viewing area where its possible to overlook the greater Tokyo area, an aquarium, but most notably it has event and office spaces that are used by various companies as their base of operations or for events. It was recently one of the main hubs for Ikebukuro Halloween Cosplay Festival, but even historically made for a convenient home to doujin events from early Comitia showcases in the 90s to the now-defunct Comic Revolution.
Yet even with space for fan events and a range of anime stores, Ikebukuro was rarely broadly considered an anime hub due to a general disregard for female fans during this era. While series like Prince of Tennis, Slam Dunk, and Yu Yu Hakusho each commanded strong female fanbases even at this time, the overall female fanbase for anime was dismissed as only a minor force within the Japanese market despite important figures like Yoshiyuki Tomino crediting female fans for elevating Gundam popularity into the series it is today.
In recent years, two distinct changes have begun to occur. Akihabara’s reputation has gone global, in part thanks to its prominence in anime, and it’s had a major impact for both businesses and visitors alike. The influx of tourists with money to spend has been a boon for some businesses, but it’s also pushed some of the smaller shops that once defined it out of the city, and raised costs for consumers in many stores. It’s a city transformed by tourism, but as a result has driven away the locals who once filled its alleys, arcades, and stores.
Many icons of the area are gone, too. SEGA arcades are now GIGO. The AKB48 theater remains, but the idol group are no longer the force they once were. The Gundam Cafe is gone. New things have taken their place, as is always the case in Tokyo. But the replacements in recent years haven’t targeted the same audiences as before, with stores like the recent Tamashii Nations that holds a home in the place of the Gundam Cafe existing more as a showroom and tourist shopping spot.
This doesn’t mean that people don’t still visit Akihabara, but for many those audiences have moved on.
Ikebukuro, by comparison, has only grown in notoriety. Stories like Ikebukuro West Gate Park portrayed it as a home of gangs and somewhere far seedier, which isn’t entirely inaccurate if you stumble upon the West of the city even now. A similar reputation could be concluded from series like Durarara!!, which also is based in the city and prominently features many landmarks you can still visit today, even if some have disappeared or evolved (the Tokyu Hands store featured in the series is now a Nitori, for example).
But Toshima, the ward that houses Ikebukuro, have made great efforts not only to incubate and support the stores that make up the classic Otome Road, but make the city synonymous with the modern, diverse world of anime. Ikebukuro has its own sponsored anime awards festival that shows films from Japan and around the world and recognizes the best in the industry known as the Ikebukuro Anime Award Festival, and it has supported numerous redevelopments that have enhanced its appeal to a broader range of fans.
This is most notable around Naka Ikebukuro Park, where the full area has been redeveloped as a multipurpose entertainment square. On one corner, a newly-built Toho Cinemas has opened with top-of-the-range screening technology. For theater fans, the Tatemono Brillia Hall shows a range of performances and at times hosts exhibitions in the walkway of their glass-fronted building. The park is an open space of seating and often hosts events, and also contains a permanent Animate Cafe stand selling themed drinks.
Opposite that is the newly-reopened main Animate Store. Following the opening of the original store, the company eventually opened a second store in 2000, so that their two Ikebukuro stores could sell merch aimed at both male and female demographics. That new store is now the largest in Japan following a recent renewal, greatly expanding upon the original facade with space for a greeting stage area underneath and an exhibition area towards the top of the store. Meanwhile, the women-oriented goods selection remains prominent in a dedicated floor to BL and Shojo manga and other merchandise selections throughout the store.
This growth has occurred in parallel to the industry’s greater funding for works targeting this female demographic, only growing this sector of the market and the industry as a whole. Works like Free!, Uta no Prince Sama, and series of its ilk in the early 2010s created a lucrative market that only continues to grow, and the city was primed and expanding to cater for this audience.
Today, the big appeal of Ikebukuro is that there’s something for everyone, anime or otherwise, all while targeting a wider demographic of hardcore and more casual fans and families. Sunshine City shows much love to Sunrise mecha classics inside the Bandai Namco Cross Store that also features the world’s largest collection of gachapon machines in a single location, but it also has official stores for family hits like One Piece, Crayon Shin-chan and Studio Ghibli alongside a Pokémon Center. When you’re done with fan activities? There’s so much more on offer beyond this. The new build Grandspace building hosts a Capcom Cafe, but it also contains a cinema featuring the largest IMAX screen in Japan. You can shop for anime stuff, then shop Japanese fashion in Sunshine City or along Sunshine 60 Street, which features a 6-floor Uniqlo.
Toshima has invested heavily into cultivating Ikebukuro city not just as the shopping and tech store hub it always has existed as - BIC Camera have their main store here and no fewer than 4 stores in the area alone - but as a city with something for everyone, especially anime fans. As Akihabara knocks down exciting stores for office blocks, Ikebukuro is embracing those who feel left behind in the former’s tourist influx and urban evolution.
Tokyo is changing, as Tokyo always changes. Yet as anime grows both domestically and globally, it’s Ikebukuro most primed to benefit.
