Nakano, Tokyo — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Nakano?

Nakano draws its crowds to a single building. Nakano Broadway stacks floors of manga, vintage figures, idol goods and second-hand watches above the covered Nakano Sun Mall, a short march north from the ticket gates. The mall runs straight from the station.

Beside it the Nakano Sun Plaza raised its wedge of a concert hall and hotel over the north exit, a fixture of the skyline that pop and rock acts filled for decades, while out in the Egota streets the Nakano Historical Museum lays the ward's older village record into a quiet residential corner. The arcades hold the rest.

What is the history of Nakano?

Nakano became a Tokyo ward in 1943. The older towns of Nakano and Nogata were folded together that year, joining the farm villages west of Shinjuku into one borough as the city spread out along the rail lines. The Chūō Line pulled it in.

Once the trains reached Nakano Station the fields gave way to close-packed housing and the shopping streets that still fan from the gates, and the post-war years raised the Nakano Sun Plaza and the covered arcade that Nakano Broadway would later crown. The Nakano Historical Museum keeps that village past.

Where is Nakano?

Nakano is a western ward of Tokyo, a dense inner borough of roughly 16 square kilometres that runs from the shopping streets and towers around Nakano Station west through Higashi-Nakano and the Nogata blocks toward the Kanda River.