The Hip Side of Japan Undiscovered by Tourists | Today’s news

When Japan closed its borders during the Covid pandemic, expats and longtime friends Hillary Hewins and Blake Piper began spending their weekends in Atami, a small seaside town just a 40-minute train ride from their adopted home in Tokyo.

Known in the 17th and 18th centuries for its soothing hot springs, Atami steadily grew in popularity as a destination for Japanese tourists during the four decades after World War II. Sprawling concrete resorts opened up and downtown filled with lively bars, cabaret shows, and other nightlife establishments, all lit up with flashy neon lights.

When Japan’s bubble burst in the early 1990s, Atami’s prosperity collapsed as well. In five short years, hotel revenues fell by approximately 25% and dozens of properties were abandoned. By 2011, visits had fallen by 55% from their peak. The local population shrank accordingly, from 50,000 to about 30,000 today.

Hewins and Piper fell in love with Atami’s faded charm. They started investing in akiya – Japan’s famous cheap abandoned houses – in the area and renovating them into rental homes. Last year, they bought a pair of dilapidated buildings in the city center for nearly ¥37.8 million, which they plan to open as a boutique hotel in 2027. They hope to restore the two lavishly designed structures to their former glory.

They are not alone. Hewins and Piper are part of a new guard of entrepreneurs eschewing the current form-follows-function Japanese aesthetic and reviving the maximalism of what is being called “Showa retro.” It refers to the period of the long reign of Emperor Hirohito, mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s, when mid-century modernism was embellished with warm colors, a touch of fabrics and bright inscriptions.

This decorative revival doesn’t just reflect a nostalgic longing for brighter times amid a weak yen and other economic downturns. It marks a return to a more analog format of human connection during the loneliness epidemic. In 2025, kodokushi – individuals found dead alone in their home – accounted for one in three deaths in Japan.

The extreme design flavor is also a reaction against the perceived sameness of so-called third-space decor, the corporatization of casual hangouts like coffee shops around the world, and signals a renewed focus on preservation in a culture that has long favored tearing down old, outdated structures over restoring them.

“When people think of Japan, they think of washitsu,” a traditional-looking room with paper screens and tatami floors, says Takuji Kitagawa, a marketing strategy specialist based in Tokyo. “Showa retro is something completely different – it has its own visual language that is truly distinctive on a global scale.” Check out this Instagram post

It’s an aesthetic of excess—every opportunity for design flourish is used to emphasize uniqueness in the face of austerity and conformity. In 2025, Kitagawa opened the Showa Club in Tokyo’s Kanda district, a modernized version of a sunakku, a type of small drinking establishment that developed during the post-war boom that emphasizes intimacy and camaraderie provided by the host-owner behind the bar.

“The war, the growth, the bubble and its collapse—in many ways, the Showa was the busiest and most vibrant part of Japan’s modern history,” says Kitagawa. Born in 1981, he grew up in what he and many others call the Lost Thirty – three decades of economic stagnation that followed the boom of the early 1990s. Opening his speakeasy, with bright red walls and a social bar, was an opportunity to “experience Show’s energy firsthand,” says Kitagawa.

Like Kitagawa, Tokyo music producer Jung Kyung-ho, who goes by Night Tempo, is a child of the 80s trying to recapture his analog youth. Although originally from South Korea, he is best known for his Showa Groove remixes of “urban pop”, a genre of Western-influenced music that originated in Japan in the 1970s. To his delight, it has taken on new momentum as “young people crave the cultural experiences of past decades in their imaginations,” he says.

The most famous monument from the Showa era may be the kissaten, literally “tea drinking shop”, although it is more generally a cafe where visitors can read, chat with friends or work. Kissaten features a baroque aesthetic that often borders on clutter and is highly individualized based on the owner’s personal taste. Expect large collections of stuffed animals or antique clocks or souvenirs from around the world, all displayed among heavily upholstered seats and plenty of dark wood accents. Check out this Instagram post

“Boom kissaten is unmistakable,” says Kitagawa. On Instagram, the #junkissa hashtag in Japanese recently reached nearly a million posts. He adds that these spaces are a salve for the automation and urban sprawl that perpetuates extreme levels of isolation in a country plagued by an aging population and low birth rates. With an average of just over 4 square meters per person, Tokyo has an extreme lack of public space compared to London or New York.

Keita Amano, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, says the rise in interest in retro Showa has to do with what he calls “light exoticism.” He describes this phenomenon as a human curiosity about our neighborhoods. We are interested in how people live in other places and how others lived in the recent past, before the advent of certain technologies. These aspects have led to an increase in interest from domestic travelers in sunakku, kissaten and other Showa relics: throwback shotengai, sento and dagashiya.

Kitagawa says that the record rush of incoming tourists may also play a big role. In 2025, international arrivals reached 42.7 million. It is the first time in the country’s history that the number of passengers has exceeded 40 million and more than 16% more than the 36.9 million visitors in the previous year. According to the World Travel Index, Japan is the highest-rated destination in the world’s tourism industry.

“Thanks to social media, everyday scenes that the Japanese have taken for granted for decades suddenly look soulful and evocative to the outsider’s eye,” he notes. “Then young Japanese people who had never given these places a second look started paying attention.”

Piper adds: “I hate to minimize it, but I think there’s a lot of interest from young people because it looks good on social media.” Piper notices the Japanese word baeru, which is the verb form of Insta-bae, meaning “to look good on Instagram.” “The term gets thrown around a lot when young Japanese talk about Atami and the whole retro Showa thing and come into town to have a coffee at a cafe to take pictures,” he says. Check out this Instagram post

In 2025, Atami surpassed 3 million overnight visitors, up from 2.8 million a year earlier. Other holiday destinations in Tokyo’s orbit are also seeing a similar surge in nostalgic interest.

Take Chichiba in Saitama Prefecture, 80 minutes from central Tokyo by train, where Odekake Watcher, which tracks GPS movements from users’ smartphones, has seen a 37% increase in female visitors in their 20s between August 2025 and this August. Like Atami, Chichibu flourished in the 1960s with the expansion of modern railways, filling up with businesses from the era that catered to domestic tourists interested in exploring the nearby national park. A representative of the prefectural tourism board attributes the renewed interest to tourists’ desire to capture the “emoi” — the slang Japanese equivalent of “emo” — aesthetic of the area’s homes, cafes and bars for their social media.

As Hewins spends more time in Atami, he notices that relics are also experiencing a renaissance, even those that have not been restored. “Three years ago, I was one of the few guests at the Hatoya Hotel, just outside Atami. During a recent stay, there were at least 150 others at breakfast.” They were all home visitors, he notes.

International guests can still be wrapped up in exploring ancient temples and modern towers: A 2025 analysis by the Japan National Tourism Organization found that 70% of the country’s visitors will visit just five specific destinations: Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, plus Hokkaido for skiing and Okinawa for beaches. “However, once foreigners start visiting for the third or fourth time,” adds Hewins, “the retro aesthetic of Showa will soon become very interesting to them as well.” Check out this Instagram post

One publicly traded Japanese company is doubling down on potential growth. Komeda’s Coffee, a retro Showa cafe chain from Nagoya with more than 1,000 branches nationwide, has a hungry plan to expand into a global franchise over the next five years, with established branches in East Asia and upcoming growth in Thailand and elsewhere. In addition to traditional decor, Komeda also adheres to hospitality principles such as table service, feeling that customers crave the human touch in the face of automation and artificial intelligence.

“The Showa, and the bubble in particular, represents the last moment when Japan felt like it was definitely winning,” says Kitagawa. “For younger Japanese who have never lived it, the maximalist confidence is more aspirational than memorable. For tourists, it’s an authentic, photogenic Japan that isn’t the polished minimalism they’ve come to expect.”

This article was generated from an automated news agency source without text modification.