American Village

This guide to American Village in Osaka starts in the quiet warehouse blocks of old Sumiya-cho, where a young designer named Mariko Higiri opened a late-night coffee shop called Loop in 1969, for no obvious reason in a neighborhood with no foot traffic. It follows how that one shop drew artists and surfers, who began filling nearby warehouses with imported jeans, records and denim through the 1970s, and how the district earned its America-mura nickname in the early eighties. Stand at the same triangle of park where it all began.