Nakano is the otaku basement and the alleys around it, and the best of it is that you can walk the whole thing without seeing the sky.
Out of the north exit into Nakano Sun Mall, a covered arcade running dead straight — cheap eats, chemists, stalls — that funnels you, deliberately, to the main event. Nakano Broadway is that event: four floors of second-hand manga, vintage figures, watches and oddities, a warren where the Mandarake shops have colonised unit after unit. Go in expecting to get lost; getting lost is the visit. You needn't collect a thing — it reads as a museum that happens to ring up sales.
Come out the back and the register drops. Fureai Road and the lanes off it are the drinking quarter, tiny izakaya under the arcade lights, mostly stirring by late afternoon. Loop back through the south-side alleys — stand-and-drink bars, ramen counters, the plain Tokyo the basement feeds on — and you're five minutes from the gates you started at. A covered walk for a wet day, and none the worse for it.
