The Hip Side of Japan the Tourists Havent Figured Out Yet

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

Known during the 17th and 18th centuries for its soothing hot springs, Atami steadily surged in popularity during the four decades after World War II as a destination for Japanese holidaymakers. Sprawling concrete resorts opened, and the city center filled with lively bars, cabaret shows and other nightlife venues, all lit up by flashy neon signs.

When Japan’s bubble burst in the early 1990s, Atami’s prosperity collapsed as well. In five short years, hotel revenue dropped by around 25% and dozens of properties were abandoned. By 2011 visitation numbers had plummeted by 55% from their peak. The local population shrunk accordingly, from 50,000 residents to about 30,000 today.

Hewins and Piper fell in love with Atami’s faded glamour. They began investing in akiya — Japan’s famously inexpensive abandoned houses — in the area, renovating them into home rentals. Last year, they bought a pair of run-down buildings in city’s downtown for almost 37.8 million yen that they plan to open as a boutique hotel in 2027. They hope to restore the two brashly designed structures to their former glory.

They’re not alone. Hewins and Piper are part of a new guard of entrepreneurs eschewing the contemporary form-follows-function Japanese aesthetic and resurrecting the maximalism of what’s called “Showa retro.” It references a period during Emperor Hirohito’s long reign, largely from the 1960s to the ’80s, when mid-century modernism was embellished with warm colors, touchable fabrics and bright signage.

Looking to the past

This decorative revival doesn’t merely reflect a nostalgic yearning for brighter times amid a weak yen and other economic doldrums. It marks a return to a more analog format of human connection during an epidemic of loneliness. In 2025, kodokushi — individuals found deceased alone in their home — accounted for one in every three deaths in Japan.

The extreme flavor of design is also a reaction against a perceived sameness of so-called third-space decor, the corporatization of casual hangouts like coffee shops around the globe, and signals a renewed focus on preservation in a culture that has long preferred to knock down old, obsolete structures rather than restore them.

“When people think of Japan they picture washitsu,” a traditional-looking room featuring paper screens and tatami floors, says Takuji Kitagawa, a marketing strategy specialist based in Tokyo. “Showa retro is something else entirely — it has its own visual language that’s genuinely distinctive on a global scale.” View this post on Instagram

It’s an aesthetic of excess — every opportunity for a design flourish is taken to stress uniqueness in the face of temperance and conformity. In 2025, Kitagawa opened Showa Club in Tokyo’s Kanda neighborhood, a modernized version of a sunakku, a type of small drinking establishment that developed during the postwar boom, which emphasizes intimacy and sociability, purveyed by the host-owner behind the bar.

“War, growth, the bubble and its collapse — in my many ways, Showa was the most eventful and alive stretch of Japan’s modern history,” Kitagawa says. He was born in 1981 and grew up in what he and many others call the Lost Thirty Years — three decades of economic stagnation that followed the burst in the early 1990s. Opening his speakeasy, with its bright red walls and sociable bar top, was a chance “to experience Showa’s energy firsthand,” Kitagawa says.

Like Kitagawa, Tokyo-based music producer Jung Kyung-ho, who goes by Night Tempo, is a child of the ’80s seeking to recapture his analog youth. Though originally from South Korea, he’s best known for his Showa Groove remixes of “city pop,” a genre of Western-influenced music that originated in 1970s Japan. To his delight, it’s gained new momentum, as “young people have longing in their imagination for cultural experiences of decades past” he says.

The most recognizable relic from Showa times may be the kissaten, literally meaning “tea-drinking shop,” though it’s more broadly a cafe where patrons can read, chat with friends or work. The kissaten is characterized by a baroque aesthetic that often verges on clutter and is highly individualized, based on the owner’s personal taste. Expect large collections of stuffed animals or antique clocks or keepsakes from around the world, all displayed among thickly upholstered seating and plenty of dark wood accents. View this post on Instagram

“The kissaten boom is unmistakable,” Kitagawa says. On Instagram, the hashtag #junkissa in Japanese has recently reached almost a million posts. He adds that these spaces are a balm to the automation and urban sprawl that’s perpetuated extreme amounts of isolation in a country plagued with an aging population and low birthrate. With an average of just over 4 square meters per person, Tokyo has an extreme lack of public space when compared with London or New York

Keita Amano, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, asserts that the upswing in Showa retro interest has to do with what he calls “light exoticism.” He describes the phenomenon as a human curiosity about our adjacencies. We wonder how people in other places are living, and how others lived in the recent past, before the advent of certain technologies. These facets have sparked a surge in interest in sunakku, kissaten and other Showa relics by domestic travelers: throwback shotengai , sento and dagashiya .

A surge in popularity

Kitagawa says the record-breaking onslaught of inbound tourists may be playing a large part as well. In 2025 international arrivals reached 42.7 million. That’s the first time in the nation’s history that travel numbers surpassed 40 million, and up more than 16% from the 36.9 million visitors the previous year. According to the World Travel Index, Japan is the highest-ranked destination for global tourism.

“Thanks to social media, everyday scenes that Japanese people have taken for granted for decades suddenly look soulful and evocative to the foreign eye,” he notes. “Then young Japanese who never gave these places a second look start paying attention too.”

Piper adds, “I hate to minimize it, but I think a lot of the interest from the young people is because it looks good on social media.” Piper notes the word baeru in Japanese, which is the verb form of Insta-bae, which means “to look good on Instagram.” “This term gets thrown around a lot when young Japanese talk about Atami and the whole Showa retro interest, and they come to town to get a coffee at a throwback cafe for the photo opportunity,” he says. View this post on Instagram

In 2025, Atami surpassed 3 million overnight visitors, up from 2.8 million the year before. Other leisure destinations within Tokyo’s orbit are also seeing an analogous rise in nostalgic interest.

Take Chichibu in Saitama prefecture, 80 minutes from central Tokyo by train, where Odekake Watcher, which tracks GPS movements from users’ smartphones, clocked 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 of-the-era businesses that catered to domestic tourists interested in exploring the nearby national park. A representative from the prefectural tourism board attributes 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 feeds.

As Hewins spends more time in Atami, she’s noticing that the relic resorts are having a renaissance as well, even the ones that haven’t been renovated. “Three years ago, I was one of few guests at Hatoya Hotel, just outside of Atami. During a recent stay, there were at least 150 others at breakfast.” These were all domestic visitors, she notes.

International guests may 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 only visit five specific destinations: Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, plus Hokkaido for skiing and Okinawa for beaches. “But as foreigners begin visiting for the third or fourth time,” Hewins adds, “the Showa retro aesthetic will soon be of great interest to them too.” View this post on Instagram

One publicly traded Japanese enterprise is doubling down on the potential growth. Komeda’s Coffee, a Showa retro cafe chain from Nagoya with over 1,000 locations nationwide, is on a hungry expansion plan to franchise globally over the next five years, with established locations in East Asia, and forthcoming growth in Thailand and elsewhere. Beyond the throwback decor , Komeda is also holding on to hospitality tenets like table service, sensing that customers crave a human touch in the face of automation and AI.

“Showa, and the bubble especially, represents the last time Japan felt like it was decisively winning,” Kitagawa says. “For younger Japanese who never lived it, that maximalist confidence is aspirational rather than remembered. For tourists, it’s an authentic, photogenic Japan that isn’t the polished minimalism they expected.”

©2026 Bloomberg L.P.

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