Akihabara

Akihabara is an area roughly the size of downtown Halifax devoted entirely to computer parts stores, video game stores, arcades, porn shops, and anime shops. I edited a quick viddy together of my day down there. Have a look!

I went down to Akihabara, Tokyo's so called electric town, to buy a memory card for Robot Phone (found a 1GB for 15 bucks). I only planned to stay there for about 20 minutes then head to the Imperial Palace, but I kept seeing such strange stuff I ended up staying there all day taking photos. In Akiba its common to see women dressed in school girl outfits or as anime characters, and when they come out, they get followed around by literally hundreds of nerds armed with giant SLR cameras. These girls pose for pictures and then hand out advertisements in the form of little paper sheets. Honestly, I found this practice distrubing, as these girls are basically the real version of a fantasy character, yet they somehow still seem unreal, like they arn't even a person. It was fascinating to take photos of these rabid nerdy photographers though and made for some great shots.

I wandered to Yodobashi Camera to have a look. To my knowledge, its the largest electronics store on earth. 8 floors, and each one is roughly the size of a football field. If its a new product and its electronic you can buy it there.

Nostalga kicked into high gear later in the day when I found the ultimate video game store. It was 5 floors, and it sold every game for every system ever produced. If it existed as anything related to video games it can be had, for a price, at this store. Later as I was leaving Akiba I saw a De Lorean, my ultimate fantasy car when I was a kid. The only other time I'd ever seen one was when I was about 9, and I still remember to this day how exciting it was. If you have enough money in Tokyo you can do anything and buy anything your mind can conceive...