By the time you get to Kameari Station on the northeastern side of Tokyo, you’re nearly an hour’s 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’s 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’s nearly flush with the road above, is SKAC.
“Kameari is an area where there are still spatial margins that do not exist in central Tokyo,” Masaki Jo, tells Highsnobiety. “We were drawn to that openness and freedom.”
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, there’s hardly an inch not covered in artful goodies, art books, or actual art.
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.
Everywhere else are books. Lots of books.
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.
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 — produced by plonking a glass top onto stacks of plastic boxes — presenting publications dedicated to German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.
It’s an overwhelming cacophony of coffee table books covering everything from James Turrell’s art to Hong Kong’s 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 SKWAT isn’t interested in classical retail architecture.
“It 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,” says Jo, who, like many SKWAT members, splits his time with design studio Daikei Mills which counts AURALEE, ISSEY MIYAKE, and NOT A HOTEL amongst its clients.
Inspired by Daikei Mills founder Keisuke Nakamura’s experience squatting in London as a student, the collective started in 2019 by (legally) “squatting” 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.
SKAC is where SKWAT’s varied interests intersect. Jo says the idea is that everything, from the exhibitions to the shops to the free spaces are “loosely connected, creating an open art centre where everyday life and creative activity naturally overlap.” This philosophy extends into SKAC’s second room.
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’s Windowlicker cover art. The rest of the room hosts an ever-changing series of installations and events.
Kwanho Lee’s knobbly chairs of “knotted” 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.
SKAC is an ambitious project of an immense scale I haven’t 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.
“We want SKAC to continue growing through exhibitions and programs that engage with the local community, allowing the space to keep evolving,” 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, “squats” in neighboring buildings.
