I went to Osu, in Nagoya, expecting a shopping arcade. What I got was a mirrored, domed ceiling straight out of an 80s shopping mall, a comedy theater that looked like it hadn’t updated its marquee in decades, a shuttered-looking coffee shop with a sun-bleached sign that could be from 1975 or from last week, and a strip of stores reselling secondhand designer handbags to a completely different crowd than the one buying anime figures two doors down. All on the same 300-meter walk.
I looked it up later, half expecting the arcade itself to be the old part. It’s not, really — there’s been a temple on this exact spot since the 1600s, when it was moved here on the shogun’s orders, roots and all. Everything else — the theater, the mall ceiling, the handbag resellers — just grew up around it over the centuries, the way a market always grows around the thing people are already walking toward.
And then there’s the bar. A kushikatsu joint with a banner outside that just says, plainly, that daytime drinking is available. Not “happy hour starting at 5.” Available. Now. If you want it.
I don’t think any of these things were trying to make a statement by existing next to each other. That’s sort of the point — nobody cleared out the old to make room for the new here. The 1960s theater didn’t get torn down when the vintage resale shops moved in. The temple didn’t relocate again when the arcade got its shopping-mall ceiling. Everything just stayed, and new things stacked in around it, and four hundred years later you can walk 300 meters and pass through all of it at once.
It reminded me a little of the older commercial streets you’ll find in a lot of American downtowns — the kind with a 100-year-old theater marquee next to a vape shop next to a diner that hasn’t changed its booths since the 60s. The difference in Osu is the timeline: the “old” layer isn’t a hundred years, it’s the better part of a millennium, and it’s not preserved behind glass. It’s just still open, next to the sneaker store.
If you want to see it for yourself, the reel is up on Threads. Which layer would you have wanted to see first — the temple, the theater, or the bar that isn’t waiting for 5pm?