Ikebukuro – weird and with it

Sweets Hotel turns a stay into a sugar rush. The exterior announces itself before you've fully registered what you're looking at: a pink building studded with giant cookies, chocolate bars and cream puffs climbing the facade like architectural frosting.

Inside, the rooms each commit to a different corner of the confectionery universe, but the presidential suite is the real cherry on top: a rooftop with a functioning merry-go-round, a pedal-powered rollercoaster, and a bed framed by an enormous dark chocolate clam shell.

Before you even get to the room, you get to pick and choose at a complimentary candy bar complete with chocolate bath salts. Hansel and Gretel would have loved it here, though the door policy is strictly adults only.

Kurage does not do ‘cute’ in a pastel, safe way, opting instead for a slicker, stranger register. A latex atelier that’s been running out of Ikebukuro since 2005, it takes the neighbourhood’s fantasy side and makes it wearable reality. The shop has been building its own latex world for years, with custom work, performance-adjacent pieces and a mood that sits somewhere between handmade fetish futurism and proper fashion obsession.

Almost everything is made to order, so what you’re really walking into is a consultation as much as a shop. The label has won fetish fashion awards in Amsterdam and Berlin, and was most recently commissioned for Bianca Censori’s debut performance show in Seoul.

Pat Market was designed around a feeling: the slight dizzy pull of a shop that makes you want to become a different person before you leave. The selection runs from Japanese vintage and Y2K references through goth-lolita and overseas select pieces, carrying Hysteric Glamour, Vivienne Westwood, h.Naoto and Tsumori Chisato, edited in a way that lands closer to personal wardrobe than costume department.

A giant plush rabbit hangs suspended in mid-air over the racks, a unicorn is attached to the property for reasons nobody fully needs to explain. Ikebukuro gives this kind of thing the breathing room that Harajuku and Shibuya don't always manage.

Every surface in Café Acorite is doing something. The shelves lining the walls hold hundreds of ceramic teapots shaped like rabbits, cats and bears, all lit from behind like a collection someone started thirty years ago and never once reconsidered. Red roses climb the exposed brick columns toward the ceiling. Your tea arrives in a pot that might have ears.

The mismatched floral china, velvet tablecloths and dense accumulation of figurines across every available corner were never styled for a photo, which is exactly what makes it photograph so well.

There’s a specific kind of visual noise that only accumulates over decades of neglect, negotiation and pure commercial desperation – and the Kumanocho intersection has it in abundance.

Hand-painted signs stack at angles suggesting nobody involved was in conversation with anyone else. Expect faded kanji characters, peeling edges, colour choices that were bold in 1987 and remain bold now for entirely different reasons. Photographers and graphic designers make pilgrimages here. It looks like a fever dream of the Showa era that simply refused to be paved over.