Akihabara

Akihabara is the shopping district for what is called Otaku culture. It’s basically an obsession with niche or specific things. What this actually means is that they have crazy tech, hobby and anime stores.

There is no way to actually convey how huge these stores are. Take a mall like we have back home, make each floor have at least two times the amount of stuff on it, and make it 8 floors high, and you have the electronics department of one of these stores.

There is one famous tech store called Yodobashi Akiba which we had heard quite a bit about. This is basically, Best Buy, Michaels, and Toys R Us in one store, with about 10x the amount of merchandise of those three combined.

The top floor was called the Restaurant Floor, which we assumed was a food court. No, it was actually an entire floor of sit down restaurants, because Japan.

There is a love and respect here for all different types of hobbies and art. You see all ages in every store looking at model robots, trains, comics or computers. In our culture seeing a 50 year old man excited about Pokemon is looked down upon, or at the very least sideways, but here people have such respect for all types of art, and hobbies.

Amanda and I ended up spending 4.5 hours in the one store as she drooled over the arts & crafts and toy section, and I lost my mind with all the models from my childhood and remote controlled offerings.