PARCO turns Nagoya's 8th floor into a ten-shop character retail zone, betting on inbound tourists
PARCO will convert Nagoya PARCO's 8th floor into a ten-tenant character retail zone this September — five of the shops debuting in the Tokai region for the first time — betting that permanent, officially licensed anime and tokusatsu merchandise can keep converting inbound tourists into paying customers, much as its parent group's rotating anime exhibitions do a few blocks away.
PARCO said in a release dated 6 July that it will open a new entertainment floor on the 8th floor of Nagoya PARCO's West Building on 4 September, turning the level over to ten tenants built almost entirely around licensed characters.
Five of the ten are first-time Tokai region openings, PARCO said: Godzilla Store Nagoya, Kamen Rider Store Nagoya, a Crayon Shin-chan shop billed as its "Action Department," an outlet called AniBirth, and a Nagoya branch of the Nishimura Yuji Purchasing Department chain. Three more are described as the only outlet of their kind in the region: a One Piece Straw Hat Store, a Sylvanian Families "Forest House Premium" shop, and a reopened Guest Cafe by Parco. A Sweets Paradise outlet already opened quietly in June, and the floor's tenth address, Parco Hall, is a new exhibition space rather than a shop. Store manager Hideyuki Takakuwa will run the floor, PARCO said.
The company has named the whole level Charaxy — its own portmanteau of "character" and "galaxy" — and Parco Hall's opening show marks the 30th anniversary of Evangelion, displaying cel paintings and production materials from the television series and its films, according to the announcement.
PARCO frames the floor around inbound demand. It said Nagoya PARCO's foreign-visitor sales reached 155% of the previous fiscal year's level in FY2025, the year to February 2026 — a roughly 55% increase — and it is betting that a floor of officially licensed anime and tokusatsu merchandise will keep pulling tourists up through the building rather than just anime enthusiasts.
A pattern already running one block over
The real lever here is presentation, not product. PARCO is converting the historically hardest floor to fill in a Japanese mall — the upper level, once given to restaurants or household goods — into licensed-character retail purpose-built for visitors chasing merchandise that content tourism (a term Japan's tourism trade uses for travel built around anime, games and characters) has made a genuine spending category. It is not an isolated bet inside J. Front Retailing, PARCO's parent: Matsuzakaya Nagoya, run by the same group's department-store arm, has cycled a Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition, a Dandadan showcase and a Ghost in the Shell retrospective through its own museum floor this summer, floortok has tracked. PARCO's move takes the same logic further, replacing a rotating temporary exhibition with ten tenancies signed on ordinary retail leases.
The timing carries its own tension. Japan's inbound arrivals fell 6.8% year on year in June, a second straight monthly decline, even as fifteen individual source markets set new June records, JNTO data showed. A floor built to convert tourist traffic into character merchandise sales is a longer-term bet than a six-week exhibition, and unlike Matsuzakaya's shows, PARCO cannot swap out an underperforming tenant every few weeks. Whether ten permanent character shops outperform Nagoya's exhibition circuit, or simply compete with it for the same visitors, is the more interesting question the September opening actually poses.