On a hot, damp, late-summer afternoon in Tokyo’s Sendagaya district, the part of the city preferred by Japanese fashion and garment companies—World, one of the country’s largest apparel firms, is around the corner; Comme des Garçons­ is a few blocks away—36-year-old Nigo, the founder, president, and designer of the streetwear brand A Bathing Ape, talks obsessively about death. His death. Which is ironic, considering that his brainchild is thriving as few streetwear brands ever have, its sneakers and hoodies breathlessly pursued by hipsters from Harlem to Hamburg.

This is a thrilling, precarious, and potentially lucrative time for Nigo. His company will either get megabig—becoming a hip-hop Polo—or it will maintain its subcultural cachet and take a pass on all those millions. It is, in short, a moment rich with opportunity rather than fraught with death.

Yet as he sits at his museum-catalog-ready Jean Prouvé dining table, Nigo, whose real name is Tomoaki Nagao, continues his morbid talk. He doesn’t want children, won’t consider owning a pet, and blames himself for the failure of his marriage to singer and dancer Yuri Ichii, a union that ended five years ago because of what he describes as his unwillingness to care about anyone more than he cares about himself and his work. “I guess I am a child,” he says. “I will always be a child.”

And it's with juvenile petulance that he talks about how Tokyo’s fashion community has turned its back on him, dismissed him, even laughed at him. "When I die and they make an auction catalog of all my possessions," he says, "then they will understand. Then they will see how important I am."

It is a depressing boast, the angst of an adult expressed through the emotional filter of a child, a pouty version of "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." He repeats the assertion then says he wants to show me some of his toys—his three floors of lunch boxes and Star Wars action figures and Pee-Wee Herman play sets and G.I. Joes and Colonel Sanders statues. He then moves on to the grownup toys: the Bentleys and Lamborghinis and Franck Muller watches and Warhol paintings and Ettore Sottsass sculptures and Futura 2000 prints and Rose Cabat ceramics, as well as the roomful of vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. And then there’s the warehouse outside Tokyo, as capacious as an airplane hangar, that’s filled with the Americana that Nigo scours the U.S. Midwest for—more toys, more plastic figures, as well as vintage jeans and antique Coke machines and Mr. Peanut outfits and jukeboxes and toilet seats that play "(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock." The stuff is unloaded from trucks and unpacked, photographed, cataloged, and prepared by a half-dozen employees so that when Nigo next visits, he can sit at his Prouvé desk, play with his toys, and dream that someday, someday, Tokyo’s fashion world will understand.

Earlier that day, on a quiet, narrow road down the street from one of the Tokyo Bathing Ape stores, I met Toby Feltwell, a 33-year-old English nonpracticing solicitor with brown hair, a broad nose, and a beard, who was carrying a handkerchief to mop the sweat off his brow. Feltwell is the head of international development at A Bathing Ape, or Bape, as it is known. During the past five years, the Nigo-designed $300 camouflage hoodies and the $190 patent-leather Bapesta sneakers have become the outerwear and footwear of choice for rappers and style-conscious musicians—and sought-after status symbols for the millions of teens worldwide who watch music videos on YouTube or MTV. For the past two summers, in hip-hop and urban-music videos, Bape imagery—the Bape logo, the gaudy-colored sneakers, the zip-to-the-top ­hoodies—seemed almost as ubiquitous as Cristal champagne and well-endowed females.

Ludacris, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell Williams are among the stars rocking Bape product. You can’t pay for advertising like that, and Bape doesn’t; in its 14-year history, the company has never bought a page of magazine advertising. Yet the wave of exposure has positioned Bape as the first Japanese clothing firm since Comme des ­Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto in the 1980s to become an international household name and, potentially, a global power.

Feltwell and I walked to various Bape clothing boutiques in the Harajuku youth-fashion area of Tokyo, as well as to a Bathing Ape hair salon, a Bathing Ape kids store, and finally, a Bathing Ape café, where we ate curry rice served on Bathing Ape plates and drank iced oolong tea from Bathing Ape glasses. The brand has had product tie-ins with DC Comics and Pepsi, among other firms. At one point in 2001, it seemed that every Pepsi can in Japan was wrapped in Bape camouflage.

Every location, brand tie-in, and celebrity-in-Bape sighting has been carefully calculated by Nigo to maintain the company’s mystique. The clothing boutiques, co-designed by Nigo and designer Masamichi Katayama, were conceived to "not feel luxurious," according to Katayama, "but fresh." And he means fresh, as in raw-fish-in-a-refrigerated-case fresh. The clothes and footwear are intended to be seen as perishable; rare; manufactured that morning, perhaps; and presented for you in a sushi-bar-style display. Katayama points out that keeping clothes and sneakers behind glass also makes sense because of a unique problem posed by Bape’s popularity: The stores have to look inviting despite the fact that, at times, there’s little product available to buy. “We sell out too fast,” Feltwell explains, “so the stores could look a bit forlorn.” Katayama’s solution is the glass cases, and Nigo came up with additional innovations, since imitated by other retailers: vending machines selling $80 T-shirts, and sneakers rolling out on conveyor belts. In an attempt to control the burgeoning resale market, clerks prevent customers from buying pairs of sneakers that aren’t their own size.

In a notoriously fickle market—urban street­wear—Bape is a curious mixture of exclusivity, inscrutability, and steady growth that could be turned into a torrent of revenue that establishes Nigo’s brand as an iconic global name. Or it could become yet another superhot brand that grows too fast and sees its business collapse as shoddily licensed product clogs outlet-mall racks around the world. The cautionary tale of the breakout youth brand that dies too young is an oft-told fashion-­industry parable—Mossimo, Freshjive, Mecca U.S.A., Gotcha, Jimmy’Z, Von Dutch—yet every new brand faces the same dilemma. Demand is insatiable; money is just sitting there in teenagers’ and twentysomethings’ wallets. Why not just reach in and take it? “Growing fast is always tempting,” Nigo says. “I could double our sales immediately, but then the brand wouldn’t be fresh anymore.”

Thus far, Bape has stuck to its formula of funding all its growth internally and through a low-interest line of credit. Japanese interest rates are famously low. Banks charge highly rated clients like Bape a mere 3 percent for loans, making it easy for Bape to fund its limited expansion thus far. “When you can borrow at the attractive terms we can,” Feltwell says, “finding outside investors is not as urgent as it would be for an American company. Of course, there comes a point when you have to consider it.”

“I’ve thought about bringing in investors,” Nigo says. “It’s not hard for outsiders to see the potential in this brand.”

The possibilities are dizzying. The American urban-fashion retail business, according to the NPD Group, a consumer-­research firm, is worth about $3 billion a year and will grow 5 percent in 2007. While industry analysts consider a brand with a 20 percent sell-through rate healthy, Bape moves more than 98 percent of what it produces and has never held a sale.

Nigo’s international expansion is just starting. At Bape’s new locations in London, Hong Kong, and Taipei, the lines around the block—all people waiting to buy merchandise—are even longer than those in Japan. When the first U.S. store opened, in New York’s Soho neighborhood in late 2004, long queues formed for the first several days the shop was open. Customers line up because Bape product is scarce, an intended consequence of Nigo’s decision to manufacture as few as a dozen of certain items and rarely more than 300 of any one garment or sneaker model. Bape is distributed exclusively through its own stores, which explains the thriving piracy of its products. The company estimates that as much as 90 percent of so-called Bape merchandise for sale online is counterfeit. If nothing else, that suggests Nigo’s talk about doubling his sales is realistic.

Despite Nigo’s strategy of tightly controlled product, curatorial brand management, and unique retail environments, the company is growing faster than he would like. "Our goal has been steady, regular growth. Ten percent a year is manageable," he says. Bape revenue in 2006, however, grew 40 percent, from $42 million to $59 million, Feltwell says. (By comparison, rival streetwear brand Stussy’s revenue from apparel sales was $35 million last year.) Those gaudy growth numbers have been fueled by the new stores, including two more in Japan, giving Bape a total of 22 stores worldwide. In addition, he is introducing the Billionaire Boys Club fashion line—jointly owned by Nigo; Pharrell Williams, the three-time Grammy-winning music producer (and Esquire’s best-dressed man in the world in 2005); and Williams’ manager, Rob Walker. "He just doesn’t have cold moments," Williams says of Nigo, "and he's having a very hot moment right now."

Nigo is contemplating whether he should exploit this heat—in an industry where lukewarm is the same as dead—to become big and finally show all those haters in Tokyo. “He can go two ways,” says Davena Mok, director of A-Vibe, a youth-consulting firm. “One: get superbig and sell out and finally open his hotel and all that. Or two: put all his millions behind him and go back underground. Standing still is not an option. Japanese kids are getting over him, so he knows the international market is where he has to go.”

"Can something big ever really be cool?” Nigo asks rhetorically when I meet him again a few days later at his house, a five-story, gray-concrete-and-steel bunker just a few blocks from the Bape offices. When Nigo opens his 15-foot-high, green-glass-and-steel front door, I am again reminded of the striking contrast between the short, phlegmatic Japanese man standing before me and the flashy brand that he has created. But then Nigo smiles—a thin-lipped grin accompanied by a slight dip of the head—revealing teeth encrusted with platinum and diamonds. Think of the bling that smile reveals, the sudden glint as shocking as finding a maggot in your steak, as a metaphor for the man: Hello Kitty meets gangsta rap, with an M.B.A. geek in the shadows.

His employees say that until very recently, Nigo had as good a handle on inventory as did the store managers themselves. “Bape is still his store,” says Skate Thing, whose real name is Shinichiro Nakamura. He’s one of Bape’s chief designers and has been a friend and collaborator of Nigo’s since Nigo was 18. “It’s hard for him to let go of that,” Skate Thing says. “But at some point, this is bigger than even Nigo.”

Just how big the brand can get came up frequently when Nigo met with investment bankers in 2005. When handbag maker Samantha Thavasa went public and achieved a market cap of $1.5 billion shortly thereafter, Nigo says bankers told him that he could expect Bape, which has more global upside, to receive a similarly healthy reception on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

"There really is no other company like Bape," says Akira Miura, who covers the fashion business for WWD Japan. "He has this condensed trademark that can be diluted and turned into a great business." Nigo insists, however, that he has no intention of going public in the near future. "But it’s tempting," he says. "Think of what I could do with that kind of capital."

For the past year, Nigo has been professionalizing Bape’s senior management team, which until now had been drawn almost entirely from the 300 employees who work in the retail stores. “The present staff would not be able to handle a high-growth environment,” says one fashion-industry observer. Nigo agrees. “We need to become a little more like other companies. I would even be willing to bring in an outside C.E.O. We may not choose to do things the normal way, but we need to at least know what normal is,” he says.

Eighteen-year-old Tomoaki Nagao moved to Tokyo in 1986 from Maebashi, a town in rural Gunma prefecture, to attend the prestigious fashion college Bunka Fukuso Gakuin, where he majored in—of all things—fashion writing. He had already discovered hip-hop and was obsessed with the style and lifestyle of the movement, even though he couldn’t quite understand what Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys were actually rapping about.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, the diminutive, precocious fashionista—his bags full of vintage denim, rare 12-inch hip-hop singles, and Adidas sneakers—found himself amid kindred countercultural spirits in the city’s late-’80s alternative scene. “Japanese designers were doing high fashion, imitating international styles,” Nigo says. “The shops weren’t selling anything new or cool. We thought streetwear—the stuff in skate shops or maybe what Stussy was doing—seemed more exciting.”

During his college days, Nigo, who typically wore a Rat Bones skater hat and a bomber jacket, took a job at a curry shop in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. “I would take the bus to Shibuya district, spend my salary on rare vinyl, and then go back to my apartment and spin,” he recalls. His twin direct-drive Technics turntables sat atop a low table on the tatami mats of his 80-square-foot apartment, which was crammed with crates of records, North Face parkas, and Adidas Superstars. He remained a fashion obsessive,  a connoisseur who could discern the most prized editions of various American vintage brands—Dickies, Carhartt, Levi’s—and such streetwear brands as Stussy and XLarge.

Nigo graduated in 1989, just as the prosperity of Japan’s bubble era was giving way to a generational malaise. Some called this generation the ’89ers. These kids basically got to the party after all the foie gras had been eaten.

Nigo, along with his col­lege buddy Jun Takahashi, later the founder of the high-fashion line Undercover, became one of the era’s leading cool hunters, writing a monthly magazine column that became a primary style guide for a generation of Japanese kids. Before the explosion of the internet, information about street fashion was much harder to find, and those who sought it had to rely on trend magazines, which sprang up in Japan to cater to otaku—obsessives who care about the precise type of rivet on a particular year’s Levi’s or how many eyelets are on a certain pair of Troop sneakers. Nigo’s heroes were Kan Takagi and Hiroshi Fujiwara, the founders of Major Force, a hip-hop act. Fujiwara started the successful brands Good Enough and Head Porter, a lifestyle-products company. (The striking physical similarity between Nigo and Fujiwara gave Nigo his nickname: Fujiwara No. 2, or just No. 2—nigou in Japanese.)

“There was this reaction against commercialized, mainstream youth culture of the ’80s,” says Tiffany Godoy, author of Style Deficit Disorder: Harajuku Street Fashion. “These guys understood this and used these magazines to channel the market in this new direction.” The cool kids who flocked to Tokyo from all over Japan convened in Harajuku to check each other out and hunt for clothes in the narrow warren of streets behind the main shopping drag. “We were like treasure hunters,” Fujiwara says. “I would go to thrift stores in the Midwest and pick out the best denim, the rarest jeans, and they would be selling for the same price as the crappy stuff. And we could bring it back and show it in the magazines. Japanese kids developed a really good eye for that stuff.” This crowd is to blame, then, for those $400 jeans in the window of New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue today.

For this movement’s young leaders, making their own clothes was an inevitable move, though it had no precedent in Japan. Just a few years before, the thought of a 22-year-old starting a clothing company would have been inconceivable in the country’s hidebound corporate culture. But in the early ’90s, young entrepreneurs like Fujiwara seized upon the punk-rock and hip-hop D.I.Y. ethos when he opened his first Good Enough shop. In 1992, Nigo designed his first garment, a T-shirt with the collegiate lettering Last Orgy II (named after his magazine column) stenciled around a simian face. He made 30, gave away 25, and sold five through a friend’s shop. The shirts immediately became a hipster badge for Tokyo’s cool kids and have since become the Japanese fashion equivalent of a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card.

Spurred by Fujiwara’s success, Nigo and Takahashi opened a shop, Nowhere, in 1993. The following year, Nigo introduced a wider array of streetwear with the Bape logo. The success of that line allowed him to give up his night job as a D.J. His original conceit followed the business model Fujiwara had pioneered at Good Enough: detailed and well-crafted streetwear sold in limited quantities and marketed only by word of mouth. Nigo regularly refused celebrities who wanted to wear his clothes if he felt their image was wrong for his brand. Within a few years, every hipster in Tokyo had the ape emblazoned on his back. Nigo has attributed different meanings at various times to the ape motif. The one most cited is his explanation that Japanese youth had become as comfortable and indifferent as an ape bathing in lukewarm water. Takahashi’s Undercover and Nigo’s Bape, at first both sharing the same small retail space, eventually became iconic countercultural brands.

Fujiwara, Takahashi, and Nigo were leading figures in the Urahara movement, which has since become the most eulogized and overanalyzed youth-culture scene in Japanese history—the country’s equivalent of Los Angeles’ Dogtown scene or New York’s early B-boy movement. From the start, though, Nigo stood out as a serious businessman. “I used to stay in the shop at night and do the accounts,” Nigo says. “My first landlord at Nowhere used to show me how I could be more ­efficient, make more money.”

“None of us were really thinking about money,” says Skate Thing. “No one else focused on the numbers like Nigo did.”

Fujiwara says the transformation of his line into a big brand was never part of his agenda. “I never worried about money, as long as I had enough. Nigo was the first to figure out that it was about the brand.”

It helped, of course, that Nigo was drawn to a Pop Art palette and childish imagery—a perfect combination of novel and unthreatening. Nigo also knew when to take the long view and risk sacrificing short-term revenue. In 1999, he was horrified to see his merchandise on racks next to brands like Tommy Hilfiger. He shut down distribution in Japan outside Tokyo, leaving only one shop in the world where people could buy Bape—his flagship store. “My accountant was furious,” Nigo says, laughing. “Revenue went off a cliff, but I knew that with the way the brand had been getting overexposed, it was either fail in a few years by continuing the way we were going or change direction and risk failing right then.”

What was bad for cash flow was a boon for the brand, as eager consumers lined up every morning—and we’re talking Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean-over-school-break kind of lines. By the end of 1999, after hiring Katayama to help reconceive his retail spaces, Nigo expanded to two other Japanese cities, Nagoya and Osaka. In 2001, he opened his first London boutique, and Japanese expansion has continued steadily, with about four new stores a year. “At some point in the near future,” says Marshal Cohen of the NPD Group, “he has to decide if he wants to continue doing it the Japanese way or begin acting more like an international fashion brand. And that means dealing with speed-to-market issues, the amount of product available, and in some cases, even the design has to be more commercialized. And that all impacts the exclusivity of the brand, which is what has made the brand work so far.”

It is ironic that Bape is the most success­ful brand to emerge from the Urahara move­ment; indeed, it’s the only Urahara brand with international reach. But to many who came of age in that scene, Nigo has betrayed its values of craftsmanship, exclusivity, and countercultural style. “He’s become a joke,” says one competitor. Fujiwara, who is still revered in Tokyo as perhaps the one man who can launch a trend, is even more dismissive of Nigo. “I just wonder how he feels when he sees ugly people wearing his clothes. If you go to the countryside in America and people are wearing Bathing Ape, that’s not very cool.” Fujiwara, now a consultant for Nike and Levi’s, shrugs. “I thought he was more like us, but he changed.”

Nigo is sitting in the back of a black Cadillac Escalade, holding a Fendi satchel the size of a spare tire between his legs. We are riding through Tokyo as he tells me that the Urahara years seem a very long time ago. He now lives in his mansion in Sendagaya and has a penthouse in Roppongi Hills—next door, actually, to his nicknamesake, Fujiwara. He has a celebrity girlfriend, actress Riho Makise, and regularly jets to New York to hang out with Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, and other hip-hop royalty. He says his international success partly offsets the lack of respect he gets in Japan. He is also realistic about the growth prospects for Bape, which now clearly lie overseas. “How much bigger can we get in Japan?” Feltwell asks. “It’s a matter of saturation.”

We are on our way to a rehearsal studio in Shinjuku. Bape’s brand extension includes a Japanese hip-hop supergroup, the Teriyaki Boyz, a creation of Nigo’s that features M.C.’s recruited from multi­platinum Japanese bands Rip Slyme and M-Flo. The group is scheduled to play with Gwen Stefani and the Black Eyed Peas at an outdoor music festival in Chiba, Japan. Nigo serves as the band’s D.J., toting his vinyl in that spacious Fendi bag.

At the studio, the Teriyaki Boyz sit around a conference table, drinking canned tea and sports drinks and slurping up convenience-store soba noodles as they wait for a late ­arrival. Ilmari of Rip Slyme reports another Axl Rose sighting—the singer was in town the past few weeks for reasons unknown and had been seen at the nightclub Le Baron. "It’s weird," Ilmari says. "You see the guy every night. It’s like, 'You’re Axl Rose! Don’t you have anything else to do?' "

"Can’t he play computer games?" Nigo suggests. Everyone nods.

"But I got my picture taken with him anyway," Ilmari says.

When the band members take up their positions in the rehearsal space, going through a set list of tracks D.J.’ed by Nigo, their dance moves are as insipid as Nigo’s beats. Around Tokyo nightclubs, Nigo’s D.J.’ing is widely criticized, but that hasn’t slowed the Teriyaki Boyz, whose album hit No. 4 on the Japanese equivalent of Billboard charts. "There will always be haters," Nigo says. "I guess I have to get used to it."

After rehearsal, back at the office, Nigo begins tearing open boxes. Every day they arrive, the shipments of rare Americana, valuable jewels, and expensive wines. Nigo’s office at the Bathing Ape headquarters, a few blocks from his home, is piled high with boxes and packages. He readily admits there’s an unhealthy compulsion behind all this. The Colonel Sanders statues? One of the world’s largest collections of Star Wars figurines? Pairs of size-200 vintage jeans originally designed as retail displays?

"I just love the smell of things," Nigo explains as he picks through today’s boxes. "I like the feel of secondhand clothes, of vinyl, the smell of an old print, of old furniture. And when I touch this stuff"—he carefully picks up a Colonel Sanders doll—"I feel good. I feel very alive. I just love having so much stuff."

But he can become melancholy and defensive as soon as he sets down his newest toy. “The fashion establishment will never take me seriously,” he says. “Because I’m a street brand, they don’t consider me a proper brand.”

Only now that Bape has become known worldwide, he adds, are Japanese fashion insiders taking some pride in him as one of their own. “I’m the ­second-richest designer in Japan right now,” Nigo says. “Only Comme des ­Garçons is bigger.”

He shakes his head. Leaning over his office desk—a Fendi steamer trunk split open and customized into a workspace—he looks over some papers detailing the financing of the Los Angeles store and sighs. He needs to keep growing, he says, become a global brand, become so big that nobody even remembers that Bape is a Japanese label. They will just think of it as a great brand, period. Only then, he says, will the haters finally have to acknowledge the 10,000-pound gorilla in their midst.