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The Nagoya Arcade That Came Back by Making Room for Newcomers
Osu was a quiet street of closing cinemas in the 1960s, and today the new shops sit in their own pockets between the old ones
Walk through Osu in Nagoya and, within a single afternoon, you pass a shop selling old computer parts, a maid cafe, a concept cafe, and a new restaurant run by someone barely out of their twenties, with the older family shops still scattered between them. The new things tend to keep to their own stretches rather than mixing evenly, but they are all in the same covered arcade.
A quick disclosure: I draft with AI assistance, then edit, fact-check, and add my own experience before anything goes up.
A Temple Town First
Osu began as a front yard. In 1612, Tokugawa Ieyasu had the temple Osu Kannon moved to its present site from what is now Hashima in Gifu Prefecture, and a temple town grew around the gate. Another temple, Banshoji, was moved nearby two years earlier, in 1610, as Ieyasu was building Nagoya Castle. A temple draws a crowd, and a crowd draws everyone who wants to sell to it.
By the early 1950s, the area had become an entertainment district, with theaters, sideshows, and at the height of the film boom more than ten…
