Before Neon Lights: What Tokyo’s Akihabara Geek District Looked Like 50 Years Ago

Brian Lam — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:20:44 +0000

Before Tokyo’s Akihabara geek district was laced with neon, it looked like this photo taken circa 1950 which I saw on my recent trip. Despite the horses in the photos, even around this time, gadgets were a part of the trade. (Although as the ads below show, phonographs and vacuum tube radios made up some of the choices.) Doing some research on the area, I did not know that almost 100 years before this time, the area was razed by fires and when it was rebuilt, it was rebuilt with a Shinto shrine on its premises with the name “The extinguisher shrine”. People assumed that the Shrine was devoted to the popular deity of fire-control named Akiba, which is the root of the somewhat similar name of the region today.

Visiting Thanko’s Tokyo Mecca of USB Weirdness

Brian Lam — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:00:28 +0000

Near a highway, a few hundred feet from the biggest electronics building in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, sits a tiny mecca for gadget geeks. The orange store belongs to Thanko, masters of weird USB devices, and it is their first of 4 shops. The blinking raremonoshop sign tickled my eyeballs, but my geek lust was triggered in full by the wall flyers for odd gadgets printed on top of a mosaic of origami paper.

Inside, I found it a bit like the best of Gizmodo’s Japan blog pages splattered into a retail space, complete with instructional placards and demo stations. They were all here. The USB heated mittens, the USB lock, the USB microscope, the USB neck tie cooler, to name a few. My purchasing restraint fell, and my credit card did not remain sheathed during this visit. Here’s a map to the store if you would like to pay homage to the USB gadget gods. Special thanks to Gizmodo.jp for leading me to the treasure trove.

Gizmodo Australia » akiba

Before Neon Lights: What Tokyo’s Akihabara Geek District Looked Like 50 Years Ago

Visiting Thanko’s Tokyo Mecca of USB Weirdness