Tucked next to a vinyl record store on a quiet street in Shibuya’s San-chome neighborhood, hordes of teen girls gather at a cafe after school to pore over* gyaru *(gal) fashion magazines, sip ramune cream sodas and take selfies on bedazzled flip phones.

The scene might seem out of the late 1990s or early 2000s, but this cafe, Retopo, only opened in November 2024 amid growing hype and nostalgia among a generation who didn’t experience the trends on their first go-round.

What was once a fascination with the Showa Era (1926-89) glitz of kissaten cafes and city pop has evolved into something glossier, more colorful and, interestingly, more recent — the Heisei Retro boom.

The Heisei Era, which spanned 1989 to 2019, was a transformative three decades that produced technology, style and pop culture icons such as Pokemon, Tamagotchi and gyaru fashion, to name just a few.

While once confined to more niche subcultures, nostalgia for Heisei aesthetics has exploded into a massive mainstream movement in 2025. From street fashion photography studios in Shibuya to themed cafes and exhibitions, the vibes of 20 years ago have returned in full excess.

Yamashita Mero is a writer, artist and collector or Heisei Era curio he then uses to create bedrooms of the time period. | COURTESY OF MERO YAMASHITA

If anyone can claim authorship of the term “Heisei Retro,” it’s Mero Yamashita, a collector, exhibition curator and writer. Since childhood, he has amassed more than 50,000 everyday items from the period — from plushies to CD players and *gacha *(capsule) toys — and now produces art installations that re-create 1990s bedrooms down to the finest detail.

Yamashita says he coined the term around 2017 to assert that even the recent past deserves reflection. “People used to ask me, ‘Why buy something from just a few years ago?’ as if it had no sentimental value. I wanted to challenge that.”

He argues that the early Heisei years belong to a distinct cultural epoch, as different from today as Showa was from the Taisho Era (1912-26). His exhibitions attract those who want to relive their teenage years alongside young people encountering things like floppy disks for the first time.

“I overhear parents tell their kids stuff like, ‘We used to listen to music on MP3s just like this,’” he says. “Those conversations become a part of the exhibition itself.”

Paradoxically, one of the biggest drivers of the boom isn’t these millennial parents but Gen Z. Nostalgia for Heisei might seem misplaced for this age bracket, yet for many, the maximalist, saturated aesthetics of the time offer respite from the digital exhaustion and cookie-cutter influencer posts dominating social media algorithms today.

Gong Ping, a university student from China who runs a street photography studio dedicated to the Heisei Era, says the time period ‘seemed full of energy — almost to excess.’ | COURTESY OF PP GAL CLUB

Few capture that longing for a past never lived more vividly than Gong Ping, also known by her artist name “pp,” a 23-year-old university student from China who runs a makeup and photo studio in Shibuya called Pp Gal Club. The studio, launched this year, gives visitors gyaru-style makeovers and offers photoshoots with fisheye lenses on Shibuya’s streets.

“I’m not drawn to Heisei culture out of nostalgia for my own past,” Gong says. “What I love is the way life back then seemed full of energy — almost to excess. It was messy, blingy, over the top, not ‘put together’ at all. It carried this feeling of: ‘I’m doing things my way. Got a problem with that?’”

PP Gal Club has racked up more than 68,000 followers on Instagram, has a collection of more than 30 magazines from the era along with thrifted relics: long, press-on nails, flip phones and colorful branded clothes. For Gong, these aren’t props but “fragments of that era’s energy.”

The trend may be dubbed a “retro boom” but to her, it’s not a revival.

“It’s a returning tide,” she says. “Around the millennium, everything was expanding at once — aesthetics, self-expression, emotion. What’s fading today is the strength of that impulse. That’s exactly what draws in the younger generation now.”

Heisei Retro aficionados say that there is value in adoring even the recent past instead of more distant eras. | COURTESY OF PP GAL CLUB

The single-named writer and cultural commentator** **Tajimax, 41, has chronicled Heisei girls’ culture since the late 2010s and also sees the boom as “a renewed appreciation for the predigital warmth and imperfection of that time.”

“Heisei culture sits on the border between analog and digital,” she says. “That makes it feel like a past you can hold in your hands.”

Heisei Retro Cafe Retopo leverages this desire for the physicality of the age, serving desserts and drinks alongside racks of *purofīrusho — *notebooks that young women in the Heisei Era would fill with their friends’ birthdays, phone numbers and other facts for future reference.

The ground floor also has flip phones and old digital cameras to play around with as well as instruction pamphlets for younger visitors who have never used them before. The store’s basement** **is decked out like a bedroom from the 2000s, with Tamagotchi, Care Bears and Nintendo DS games lining the walls.

In her Chiba Prefecture home, 21-year-old Instagrammer Viviko, has decorated her own bedroom with Heisei paraphernalia. She traces the start of her obsession back to junior high school, when, at 14, she watched the 2018 film “Sunny.” Seeing the characters using pagers, CDs and disposable cameras — all of which can now be done on a single smartphone — felt new and exciting to her.

Bonding with her mother over an era she herself barely experienced herself, Viviko (who asked for her full name to not be shared due to privacy reasons)** **began her collection at 15, focusing mainly on goods from 1996 to 1998. She also brings her collection to cultural revival pop-ups and events.

Mero Yamashita sits in one of the bedrooms he created to look as if it was a frozen slice of the Heisei Era. | COURTESY OF MERO YAMASHITA

For Instagram creator Nekura no Macharo (who similarly goes by her handle for privacy reasons), who makes skits and outfit videos and organizes events for fans of the boom, Heisei’s appeal lies squarely in the contrast between that era’s optimism and today’s uncertainty.

“Flashy, colorful culture tends to thrive during times of economic or political anxiety,” she says. “The Heisei culture born out of Japan’s lost decades was bold and vibrant. Now, amid a weak yen and rising global tensions, that bright energy feels especially appealing.”

In her view, every revival movement follows a natural cycle, each generation reimagining what came before. What matters is whether the revival becomes a living culture or ends as a passing consumer trend.

For marketers, nostalgia remains a powerful tool to revive beloved IPs while appealing across age groups — a kind of consumption known as emo shōhi, or “emotional consumption.”

Yamashita sees this as both inevitable and healthy.

“Nostalgia is a deeply positive emotion — it brings people joy and comfort,” he says. “For companies, it’s also lower-risk. They can reuse familiar intellectual property instead of inventing new ones from scratch.”

Cultural strategist and* emo shōhi *expert Kento Imataki, CEO of branding agency Boku To Watashi And, says that “at its core, the Heisei Retro boom stems from digital fatigue and a subconscious desire for comfort.”

“In today’s always-on social media environment, the stress of keeping up with ‘the now’ is wearing down Gen Z,” he says. “What they long for is ... a past they can feel safe in.”