Today was bright and sunny so I decided to go to Akihabara to take a walk around. I walked down to Minani-Senju Station and took the Hibiya line to Akihabara Station. I chose a random exit and started walking. The area is busy and loud. Music or a recorded spiel or video game sounds come out of every door. There are a lot of people outside their shops hawking their wares or trying to entice you to come inside. It reminds me of just about every carnival that I have ever been to.
There are also on quite a few girls dressed up as maids or a least dressed in the way that anime thinks that maids dress. They are quite keen to give you a leaflet and to invite to their cafe. The whole effect falls somewhere between kawaii and odd. If I get time I’ll have to try a cafe and see what goes on. The prices on the leaflets would suggest that the atmosphere does not come cheap. One of the reasons that they are out in the street advertising is that you would never find these cafes unless you went looking for them as they are often on the 6th or 7th floor of some non descript building.
Akihabara was originally an electronics district and you can still see these roots in some of the shops. There are some arcades with many small stalls in them that sell electronic components. Typically these stalls have enough room for a chair with a small counter in front. I would guess that the entire stall would be about 6′x8′. Many stalls only sell one type of part! A wire stall, a capacitor stall, an LED stall etc. I cannot imagine how they make a living doing this!
Akihabara has become a centre for manga, anime and related stuff. There are also a lot of game arcades. Most stores are small in area but quite tall often 5 or more floors with a different department on each floor. I wandered though a bunch of them and found that I recognized probably half of the characters in the posters and knew most of the songs that were playing. What does this say about me? I’m glad that I can’t read Japanese well yet or I would have bought too many books.
Lunch was ramen. Yay!! The maids didn’t stand a chance. The place that I ate really interesting. You made your choice outside the shop on the sidewalk from pictures and then bought a ticket from a vending machine. You entered with the ticket and sat at a counter. The staff behind the counter took your ticket and gave you a checklist. You choose and ticked off about 20 different options about broth type and strength, spiciness, toppings, noodle type etc. and they custom make your bowl of ramen. I’m typically considered a fast eater but I would not even get to the semi-finals in the ramen olympics. Most customers could slurp back a bowl while I was waiting for mine to cool.
Ramen Menu. The card at the top are your options.
Ramen and Beer
After lunch I had planned to go to a shrine but got distracted on the way there and never made it. Akiba would be a bad place if you have ADD. I’m sure that it nothing to do with the beer that I had with lunch. I stopped to admire a miniature lathe in front of a shop that sold many tools most of them related to electronics. While I was there the owner came out and we talked for a bit. He said that he did not know anything about electronics but he really liked tools. A lot of the small shops seemed to be this way. People doing or selling something that they liked. Something that is becoming increasingly rare in Canada.
On the way back to the hotel I used a different entrance to the Akihabara Station. This apparently makes a difference as I went through one set of turnstiles and then could not get through a second set to get to the train that I wanted to take. I decided to improvise and take a train that I could get to and take a different way back. This could have gone better as I ended up going in the wrong direction which just made things more complicated.
While walking back to the hotel I came across 3 young women standing on the M-S station pedestrian overpass looking worried. They were obviously not Japanese and I asked if I could help. They were looking for a 7/11 which happened to be about the only place that I could actually give reliable directions to. I was going that way so we walked together for while. They were in Tokyo from Indonesia and had only arrived this morning.
More impressions of Tokyo
-Many cyclists, no helmets at all.
-All people that I saw reading a book had a wrapper over the book so that you could not see the covers. Why? to keep the book clean? Privacy? Maybe so some random person on the train doesn’t say “I read that book and the butler did it”?
-In North America on most escalators the hand rails move slightly faster than the steps, here they all seem to move at the same speed.
-I rode an escalator that had a landing! Stairs, flat and then more stairs. I have never seen one before and can’t really think of why you would want to do this as the landing was only about 8 feet long an didn’t seem to serve any purpose. Kind of neat though.
-All of the sidewalks and train stations have areas of yellow strips with raised bumps. Most of the time these strips seem to be in random places. These bumps do not work well with luggage castors.
-Japanese school uniforms are kind of cute although I would have hated to wear one when I was a kid. I would have lost that hat/helmet thing fast.
Seen in a train station. Don’t loose that hat.
-You can buy a lot of stuff from vending machines with the Suica card.
-Multi layer parking lots for bicycles with locks.