Tokyo's 'Harajuku for Grandmas' losing appeal among the elderly

A relatively empty "Fourth Day" festival at the Sugamo Jizodori Shopping Street. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM
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TOKYO - Harajuku is renowned as Tokyo's mecca for outlandish youth culture, but over in the city's north-west is a district known as Sugamo that has come to be affectionately known as "Harajuku for Grandmas".

The label has stuck since 1987, when it was first given in a front-page news story, but residents admit that Sugamo, located two stops away from busy commuter hub Ikebukuro, is struggling to replicate its heady past in the late 1980s and 1990s, when as many as 100,000 people would throng it on festival days.

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