When Japan shut its borders during the Covid-19 pandemic, expats and long-time 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 centre filled with lively bars, cabaret shows and other nightlife venues, all lit up by flashy neon signs.

Hewins and Piper fell in love with Atami’s faded glamour.

They began investing in – Japan’s famously inexpensive abandoned houses – in the area, renovating them into home rentals. In 2025, they bought a pair of run-down buildings in the city’s downtown for almost 37.8 million yen (about US$240,000) 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 are 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 is called “Showa retro”. The term refers to a period during Emperor Hirohito’s long reign, particularly from the 1960s to the 80s, when mid-century modernism was embellished with warm colours, touchable fabrics and bright signage.

The word originated in ancient Chinese texts; meaning “radiant peace”, it was chosen as an auspicious name to mark Hirohito’s rule when he ascended the throne in 1926.

This decorative revival does not merely reflect a nostalgic yearning for brighter times amid a weak yen and other economic doldrums.

It marks a return to a more analogue format of human connection during an epidemic of loneliness.

The extreme flavour of design is also a reaction against a perceived sameness of so-called third-space decor and the corporatisation of casual hang-outs such as 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 ,” says Takuji Kitagawa, a marketing strategy specialist based in Tokyo, referring to traditional-looking Japanese rooms featuring paper screens and tatami floors. “Showa retro is something else entirely – it has its own visual language that’s genuinely distinctive on a global scale.”It is 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 neighbourhood, a modernised version of a , a type of small drinking establishment that developed during the post-war boom emphasising intimacy and sociability with a host-owner behind the bar. “War, growth, the bubble and its collapse – in many ways, Showa was the most eventful and alive stretch of Japan’s modern history,” Kitagawa says.

Like Kitagawa, Tokyo-based music producer Jung Kyung-ho, who goes by Night Tempo, is a child of the 1980s seeking to recapture his analogue youth.

Though originally from South Korea, Jung is best known for his Showa Groove remixes of city pop, a genre of Western-influenced music that originated in 70s Japan.

To his delight, it has gained new momentum, as “young people have longing in their imagination for cultural experiences of decades past”, he says. Keita Amano, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, says 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 , cafes and other Showa relics from domestic travellers: throwback (covered shopping arcades), (bath houses with elaborate tile mosaics) and (bodega-like candy shops).

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 is the first time in the nation’s history that travel numbers have surpassed 40 million – up more than 16 per cent from the 36.9 million visitors in 2024. 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,” Kitagawa says.

“Then young Japanese who never gave these places a second look start paying attention too.”Piper adds, “I hate to minimise 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 in Japanese, 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,” Kitagawa says.

In 2025, Atami surpassed 3 million overnight visitors, up from 2.8 million in 2024. 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 per cent increase in female visitors in their twenties between August 2025 and August 2026.

Like Atami, Chichibu flourished in the 1960s with the expansion of modern railways, filling up with 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 – the slang Japanese equivalent of “emo” – aesthetic of the area’s homes, cafes and bars for their social media feeds.

International guests may still be wrapped up in exploring ancient temples and modern towers: a 2025 analysis by the Japan National Tourism Organisation found that 70 per cent 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, the Showa retro aesthetic will soon be of great interest to them too,” Hewins says. One publicly traded Japanese enterprise is doubling down on the potential for growth.

Komeda’s Coffee, a Showa retro cafe chain from Nagoya with more than 1,000 locations throughout Japan, plans 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 – think red velvet booths, warm wooden interiors and bubble lettering on the signage – Komeda is also holding on to hospitality tenets such as 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.”