Nakano
Nakano is now a Mecca for Otaku who has enormous knowledge about comics and anime. Inside Nakano Broadway, a five-storey shopping mall with various kinds of shops and services, there is Mandarake, which sells not only comics but wide range of anime-related products such as CDs, costumes and figures as well as antique goods and toys such as trading cards and stickers, plastic models, and other rare stuff. They have more than twenty branches spreading around as if they occupy the entire building.
In front of the main branch with hundreds of thousands of different comics, there is always a line of people standing in front of the shelves and quietly reading their favorite comics. Inside the shop, you may find several employees wearing anime costumes. One of their branches even sells such costumes. However, unlike Akihabara, another site with more Otaku kids hanging around, you would see few or even none of the customers wearing costumes. While Akihabara is to have performance with costumes, Nakano, on the other hand, is purely a place for shopping.
Both Mandarake and Nakano Broadway issue their own brochures written in Japanese, English, French, Spanish and Korean. In fact, you would see some foreigners shopping around as well as taking some pictures of this interesting site. If you like comics and anime, you can enjoy the site for the whole day. If you do not, it is still interesting to see a part of the Japanese subculture. In order to avoid paying too much on certain products, make sure you look around the mall first, and then decide what to purchase. Otherwise, you might not have enough money to purchase what you really want.
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