By the time you get to Kameari Station on the northeastern side of Tokyo, you\u2019re nearly an hour\u2019s train journey away from hotspots like Shibuya and Shinjuku. Then, the walking begins. For almost fifteen minutes, you stroll alongside train tracks through what is by Tokyo\u2019s standards a quiet suburb, but for most other cities is a bustling urban district. You make your way through that until you encounter an overpass whistling with speeding trains on the JR Joban line. Underneath, tucked in so neatly that it\u2019s nearly flush with the road above, is SKAC.<\/p>\n
\u201cKameari is an area where there are still spatial margins that do not exist in central Tokyo,\u201d Masaki Jo, tells Highsnobiety. \u201cWe were drawn to that openness and freedom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jo is part of SKWAT, the creative collective that runs SKAC, short for SKWAT Kameari Art Centre, in a sizeable but unassuming building. Inside, however,\u00a0there\u2019s hardly an inch not covered in artful goodies, art books, or actual art.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once inside, you enter the huge main room past a wide corridor stacked with records up to the roof. This is the entire inventory of record store VDS. To the right, more vinyl, some of which a DJ is spinning, and record players for sampling any album that intrigues you. <\/p>\n
Everywhere else are books. Lots of books.<\/p>\n
twelvebooks, an artsy bookstore, uses SKAC as a warehouse, shop, and exhibition space for its immense 80,000 volumes. Piles of books create small mountains of literature atop pallets, interspersed with chairs for comfortably flicking through the pages. Two stories of rickety metal floor-to-ceiling scaffolding packs in yet more books and, in direct view of customers, staff sort through heavy boxes of even more newly delivered books.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
During my visit, there was also an exhibition that dotted benches and chairs upcycled from aluminium sheets amongst the mass of books and an installation of six makeshift desks \u2014 produced by plonking a glass top onto stacks of plastic boxes \u2014 presenting publications dedicated to German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an overwhelming cacophony of coffee table books covering everything from James Turrell\u2019s art<\/a> to Hong Kong\u2019s unknown brutalist architecture, furniture design, and music all chaotically thrown into what looks more like a vast warehouse than a store or an art gallery. But\u00a0SKWAT isn\u2019t interested in classical retail architecture.<\/p>\n \u201cIt began as a project to occupy urban voids, overlooked or unused spaces, and transform them into places of value that are opened to the public,\u201d says Jo, who, like many SKWAT members, splits his time with design studio Daikei Mills which counts AURALEE, ISSEY MIYAKE, and NOT A HOTEL<\/a> amongst its clients. <\/p>\n Your Highsnobiety privacy settings have blocked this Instagram post.<\/p>\n Enable All Media<\/p>\n Inspired by Daikei Mills founder Keisuke Nakamura\u2019s experience squatting in London as a student, the collective started in 2019 by (legally) \u201csquatting\u201d in a Harajuku dry cleaners Nakamura transformed into a bookstore. This practice has developed to include turning public toilets into art exhibitions and producing a Lemaire pop-up store filled with upcycled furniture.\u00a0<\/p>\n SKAC is where SKWAT\u2019s varied interests intersect. Jo says the idea is that everything, from the exhibitions to the shops to the free spaces are \u201cloosely connected, creating an open art centre where everyday life and creative activity naturally overlap.\u201d This philosophy extends into SKAC\u2019s second room.<\/p>\n Walk through the mounds of books, outside to where a tattered leather sofa creates a makeshift chill-out area, and around the corner is a second building. In one corner is TAWKS, serving specialty coffee from local roasters in a small cabin filled with posters and various ephemera that includes two posters of Aphex Twin\u2019s Windowlicker cover art<\/a>. The rest of the room hosts an ever-changing series of installations and events. <\/p>\n Kwanho Lee\u2019s knobbly chairs of \u201cknotted\u201d sponge pipes and nylon ropes were placed in neat rows during my visit, though SKAC will soon replace those with new interactive artworks. For now, they made comfortable seats for sipping coffee.<\/p>\n SKAC is an ambitious project of an immense scale I haven\u2019t seen anywhere else. Navigating around the enormous bookstore alone is a novel experience, let alone taking in all the art and the music and the installations. But SKAC is only getting bigger.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want SKAC to continue growing through exhibitions and programs that engage with the local community, allowing the space to keep evolving,\u201d says Nakamura, revealing that the facility will be nearly double its current size come spring 2026 as it expands into neighboring buildings. Or, should I say, \u201csquats\u201d in neighboring buildings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time you get to Kameari Station on the northeastern side of Tokyo, you\u2019re nearly an hour\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-504708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n