I often do a lot of research on the items I post and discovered a fair few anime posters from the early 1980s were manufactured by a company called Animepolis Pero, whom I not previously heard of.
After the "Yamato Boom" of the late 1970s, which in turn created the modern Japanese anime fandom, Toei realised they could market and sell merchandise to this new fandom. While initially they sold scripts, movie posters and other unwanted promotional and production material via their movie theatre chains, they soon created their own merchandise and their own chain of anime shops, Animepolis Pero, which was the very first anime shop chain. The Pero part of the name comes of the cat character Pero from Toei Douga's 1969 film "The Wonderful World of Puss 'n Boots", whom is a mascot character for the studio.
The first Animepolis Pero opened in the same building as the Umeda Toei Theatre in Osaka in 1980. The above two pictures show the Matsuyama store front in 1984. You can see the interior of one of the shops via the theatrical feature "'80 Animation: The Best Ten" here, which played with "Cyborg 009: Legend of the Super Galaxy" in December 1980. As you can see the vast majority of customers were high school girls or young women. 45 years on, the key demographics of anime stores haven't changed. Anytime I go into any Animate or Lashinbang store, it is always filled with high school girls or young women, and very few men.
A total of 14 Animepolis Pero shops opened as far north as Sapporo and as far south as Fukuoka, mostly during 1981. Two spin off stores named Anime Plaza Mi-kun (named after the cat that appears in Leiji Matsumoto's works), were situated in Shibuya and Shinjuku. The shops raked in a lot of money for Toei. On the opening day of the Matsuyama store in Ehime Prefecture in January 1981, 3,000 people showed up and spent ¥6.5 million, which is absolutely bonkers.
Apart from creating their own merchandise based on Toei's properties, Animepolis Pero would often hold events including appearances by voice actors and even doujinshi events. A 1985 event at the Matsuyama store, called Comic For You, was apparently the very first corporate sponsored doujinshi event. Kenichi Sonoda even drew the cover of the pamphlet for the event which listed all of the circles taking part.
As the 1980s progressed, Toei began to licence and outsource the manufacturing of it's merchandise to companies like Movic. In the late 1980s Movic began to significantly expand their Animate chain store nationwide, eventually taking a large slice of the market. In response Toei began closing down Animepolis Pero during the 1990s, with the last store, in Umeda, Osaka, shutting up shop in March 2001.
