PARCO completes Ikebukuro flagship's biggest-ever renewal around Japan's first Ultraman and Star Wars stores

PARCO said it has completed the largest renewal in the history of its Ikebukuro flagship, reworking roughly 2,600 tsubo of floor space and using much of it to install pop-culture retail as an anchor category: Japan's first official Ultraman store and Star Wars store, alongside an expanded Onitsuka Tiger and a new Pop Mart unit.

The renewal is opening in phases rather than all at once. Onitsuka Tiger reopened on September 18 with double its previous floor space, alongside refreshed shops for kolor, Hysteric Glamour, Studious and Conz, according to PARCO. The Star Wars Store by Benelic — which the company calls Japan's first official Star Wars shop — opens on the sixth floor on October 1, followed on October 9 by the Ultraman Store on the second basement level, which PARCO gives the same "Japan's first official shop" billing. A Pop Mart unit and a run of fashion and lifestyle openings follow through October 16, with further shops due to open into mid-November.

Anchoring a flagship renewal around two licensed-character stores rather than fashion labels is a Product call as much as a Place one: PARCO is betting that Ultraman and Star Wars fans will do for footfall what a marquee apparel tenant once did. It is not a one-off for the group — PARCO already runs Nintendo Tokyo at its Shibuya store and opened Pop Mart's first Hiroshima shop earlier this year — so Ikebukuro's line-up reads as another instalment of a strategy the company is running across its portfolio, in a category where youth-led commercial buildings increasingly compete with the department-store format next door rather than imitate it.