Adventures in Japan: Tokyo Trip: Akihabara

Day4, Part 1.

(Austin)

So the fourth day, our last day, finally came. On this day we planned to do an all day shopping spree in Akihabara. Akihabara is the largest shopping area in the world for anime and manga goods. They also have a ton of arcades and other niche anime related things like maid-cafes. Sadly, I wasn't on my photo-taking-A-game, so I only have a few photos.

In Akihabara the building were completely covered in all kinds of advertisements. There were advertisements for games, new anime that would be airing, manga sales, pictures of idol groups, band concert advertisements... so much. It was really cool to see all of it. I think anyone who likes anime and manga has dreamed of coming to Akihabara atleast once because of how much of a mecca it is for anime goods. I've seen the place so many times in movies and anime, so it was kinda surreal to finally be in the town myself.

There are a lot of shops that specialize in selling anime figures. An anime figure is a small statue-like plastic figurine that depicts a character from an anime or manga. There also are figures for some very popular games. Often anime figures depict women due to the fact that a large percentage of the audience of anime that would actually buy figures are males. This however does not mean that there aren't any male figures. Popular games like Metal Gear Solid and movies like Ironman often have figures made of them in stunning detail.

Picture of Hatsune Miku dressed in Kimono, a traditional Japanese dress.

Captain Levi from the incredibly popular anime: Attack on Titan

We basically window shopping for a few hours, buying a few badges here and there. I did buy a small figure in one shop though. It was super cheap compared to many of the other places I had gone. After wandering around for a while we saw a sign advertisement that had the name of our favorite poster shop on it. The poster shop that we would often go to in Nipponbashi in Osaka was only a branch shop. The actual shop was apparently here in Tokyo, right here in Akihabara! Our wallets knew what was coming as we rode the elevator to the top of the building and stepped out..

The poster shop was probably twice as big as the one in Osaka in terms of the stock they had. There was so many nice posters and beautiful art. In the back of the shop hung the originals for all of the posts. They put on display the original, hand-painted art pieces that we created and used to make the posters in the front of the store. While the posters were 3000¥ (roughly $30) the original pieces were anywhere from 100,000¥ ($892) to 250,000¥ ($2232). Sooo expensive. After buying a few posters we left the shop satisfied but with much lighter wallets.

As the day was starting to draw to a close we decided to grab a bento from the local convenience store: Family Mart. We bought our food and ate just outside the store. It was fun to eat and just watch all the different people walk by. Anime, manga, and consequently Akihabara is not just for young people; while people watching you'll notice people from roughly 8 years of age all the way up to 70-80. Sure, most people are children / young-adult age, but the other folks weren't rare either. Unlike cartoons in the US which are very clearly geared towards children, anime and manga have lots of different genres, all geared towards different tasted and ages. There isn't a stigma here for watching or reading them as there might be in the US if an adult stated that they enjoyed watching cartoons or actively debated the latest anime episode as if it were the latest episode of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones.

With our bellies full and hearts satisfied, we made our way towards to Tokyo airport.