There’s no place more fitting for a Gundam Cafe than in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Sadly Japanese maids don’t draw hearts in syrup over your pancakes or put “love spells” on you like at Maid Cafes… but there are Gundam biscuits!
Akiba’s Vstone Robot Centre is the nerd-friendly destination’s first robot store, selling robots as well as robot kits and parts for robots. If it’s as otaku as other parts of Akiba, expect a lotta dudes. [Dvice]
Nikkei has a post about Toshiba’s new Digital Billboard in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, where passerbys can dial up a number and connect to an interactive game which is displayed on the giant sign.
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. galleryPost('akiba1950s', 3, '');
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.
Google’s dutiful camera vans have finished canvassing Tokyo, which means today you can now tour some of the world’s most geek-friendly real estate in “electric town” Akihabara without the 14 hour plane flight. The folks at Mars Mag have put together a tour of some of their favourite Linux Maid Cafes, Dream PC builders, arcade palaces and electronics megastores that call Akihabara home.
Even if you don’t speak a word of Japanese, there’s a lot of intensity and information to be had in this newscast of the tragic Akihabara killings last Sunday. I’d just offer up a word of warning before you hit play, as there’s graphic material found throughout the clip.
A 25-year-old man who went berserk in Tokyo—killing seven people and wounding at least 11 others—told police, “I came to Akihabara to kill people… I am tired of the world,” according to Reuters and other news stories now hitting the wires.
