Ikebukuro 池袋

Ikebukuro is the otaku district that women built. While Akihabara’s shops were sorting figures by bust size, the lanes east of Ikebukuro station around Sunshine City grew into Otome Road, a strip of stores dedicated to boys’ love manga, idol goods and cosplay rental, with butler cafes instead of maids. The nine-floor Animate flagship is the world’s largest anime shop, and on weekends the surrounding streets fill with fans carrying bags of trading badges to swap. Sunshine City itself is a 1978 complex built on the site of Sugamo Prison, with an aquarium on the roof, a planetarium and a Pokémon Center.

The second-busiest station in the world also feeds the city’s most interesting new Chinatown. The north exit is lined with Sichuan and Dongbei restaurants that cater to the Chinese students of the nearby universities, where menus are handwritten and the pepper is not toned down. Ikebukuro is not pretty, but it is unselfconscious, and that is exactly why the fandoms and the food are better here than in the places that polished themselves for visitors.