POPEYE's 50th-Anniversary Show Opens at Shibuya PARCO November 20, With a Room That's All for Sale

POPEYE, the Tokyo magazine that has sold itself as the "Magazine for City Boys" since Magazine House (then Heibon Publishing) launched it in 1976, is marking its 50th year with an exhibition at Shibuya PARCO. The POPEYE 50th Anniversary Exhibition runs at PARCO MUSEUM TOKYO, on the building's fourth floor, from Friday, November 20 to Monday, December 21. PARCO announced the exhibition in late October, and the full programme around it followed on November 2.

A free-entry archive area has 50 issues picked by the editors to sit and read. In the paid exhibition, visitors walk through displays of the fashion each era of the magazine put forward, and see a recreation of the editorial desk from the year it launched. There's merchandise made only for the show, and the magazine says it will hand out a pocket-size POPEYE collecting fifty years of its best columns. Entry is ¥700 including tax, with a gift, last entry 30 minutes before closing, and free for children of elementary-school age and under. It's open 11am to 9pm, closing at 6pm on the first and last days.

A room where everything is for sale

The part that will interest anyone who reads POPEYE for its shopping pages is downstairs. From November 20 to December 6, the POPEYE SELECT SHOP takes over DAIROKKAN, the pop-up space on Shibuya PARCO's ground floor facing Nakashibu-dori, and dresses it as a "city boy's room". The furniture, the vintage clothes in the closet, the used books on the shelf and the things on the table are all for sale, alongside POPEYE's own picks and illustrations and photographs that have run on its covers and pages. Shiseido's skincare brand BAUM is handing out postcards there with essays on "the scent of a city boy".

POPEYE

Two open days and a film weekend

On November 21 and 22 the magazine moves onto the tenth-floor roof space, PBOX STND, for POPEYE OPEN DAY, free to enter with some events ticketed: talks, DJs, pizza from PIZZA SLICE and a garage sale of the editors' own clothes, books and odds and ends. The first day is themed "HOW TO BE A MAN.", with editor-in-chief Yuji Machida interviewing Bose of Scha Dara Parr; the second, "Thank you, Olive!", is about what city girls are thinking and how they live now. CURRY UP, the curry shop run by HUMAN MADE, is making a limited menu for the event at its basement shop in the building.

Because the issue of POPEYE out in November is a film issue, the magazine is also taking over a screen at SPACE PART 3 by PARCO from November 27 to 29, with a different programme each day: Yasujiro Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon on the 27th; Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future on the 28th, with a talk by Hamaguchi after his film; and Sho Miyake's The Cockpit and Richard Linklater's SubUrbia on the 29th, with a special edition of POPEYE Web's film podcast, PARAKEET CINEMA CLASS. Tickets go on sale November 9.

Our read

Fifty is a long life for a magazine, and most anniversary shows are an archive behind glass. POPEYE's has the archive, but the piece of it that matters is the shop: a room where you can buy the chair, the jacket and the book is the magazine's format turned into a place, which is what POPEYE has always been for its readers, a guide to what to own. PARCO is opening it as a special programme of Shibuya PARCO's own seventh anniversary, November 20 to 29, and keeping the exhibition and the shop open well past it.