Shinsekai Market

When shops in this Showa-era covered arcade began closing one by one, the remaining merchants launched a cheeky poster campaign that saved the whole street. Self-deprecating advertisements went viral across Japan, transforming a fading market into a cult destination. Now visitors flock here not just for kushikatsu and retro arcade games, but to see the humorous signage that turned decline into design gold, proof that sometimes the best marketing strategy is laughing at yourself.

Shinsekai Market opened in 1916, four years after the surrounding district itself was built as a vision of the future, modeled half on Paris and half on Coney Island, with the Tsutenkaku Tower standing in for the Eiffel. Postwar reconstruction gave the market a brief run as a bustling arcade of some fifty shops, but Osaka’s aging population and the slow migration of shoppers elsewhere left storefront after storefront shuttered by the 2000s. The turnaround began in 2012, when a ceramic artist named Haruki Kumagai moved into a vacant unit and started an event called Self Matsuri, ultimately becoming head of the market’s shopping cooperative. The posters that followed poked fun at everything a dying shopping street was supposed to hide: the empty units, the missing customers, the general sense of having been left behind by 1970. It turned out people preferred honesty to nostalgia. The market never got new shops so much as new reasons for people to notice the old ones.