Akihabara Electric Town

Two posts in about 24 hours? Unheard of!

So, as the title mentions, a few of the guys I'm rooming with and I went into Akihabara for the day. We were originally planning to hit up a lot of Tokyo, but we ended up spending a lot of time in Akihabara, and it wiped us out.

It was...shall we say, an experience. I'm sure most of you know what Akihabara is- the anime, manga, video game, and general Otaku center of Tokyo, which, with Tokyo being the center of Japan and Japan being the center of Otaku stuff...pretty much makes it ground zero for all things to do with anime, manga and the like.

So, let's start with where we went first- a big ol' arcade right across the street from the station. In the basement were rows upon rows of fighting games that my buds dived right into. They were pretty good. We walked up and down the street, marvelling at the amount of girls in costume hawking maid cafes. We checked out some amazing stores- there was this one amazing figure shop where I would literally blow thousands of dollars if I had it (I ended up only buying a cute little Motoko figure for 100 yen, but I'll be back for some of the better stuff.) We got food from these street vendors.

There really was an awful lot of advertisements for the moe stuff, which coupled with the maid cafes, really says that yes, a lot of the otaku industry, so to speak, is about catering to dudes' fetishes. There's really no getting around that fact, despite all of the other awesome stuff that goes on.

Oh, and there was also a lot of Touhou stuff being advertised. Is there a new game out or something?