Back In Time: Vintage Maps of Akihabara (1976–2001)

Magnificent!

From 1986, when I was living in Tokyo and bought my first computer, until 1999, when I moved to Yokohama, I probably visited Akihabara a couple of times a month on average. I would go there mainly to buy computer and audio equipment, but I also enjoyed just wandering around to see what was available.

In those days, and probably still today, Akihabara was constantly changing. The shopkeepers adapted quickly to trends, and smaller shops in particular seemed to appear and disappear at a rapid pace. Every visit I discovered something new. I contrasted that with another neighborhood I frequented—Ginza—which seemed pretty much the same from year to year.

Your collection brings back a lot of memories. Thanks.

The page has burned through over 45GB of data in a handful of hours! YIKES! So I have just made some image size and quality optimisations and now link out to Internet Archive for the larger versions. Let's see if that slows down data and money usage. Patreon supporters are always welcome! https://www.patreon.com/gingerbeardman

That's gikun (義訓), a fun feature of Japanese that's often used and abused in popular culture. For those not familiar there are explanations and examples in this article: https://morg.systems/Gikun

If you have an interest in Japanese but can't commit to learning it, you can have a lot of fun by just learning Katakana (the alphabet used for foreign words like this). You see english words like this all the time, I used it multiple times a day there and it's a neat party trick to read them. I still catch lots of words in the wild even here in Aus.

Surprisingly useful if you travel there! Want some coffee? Well gosh, that's コヒ (kohi). Need a bathroom? Look for トイレ！(toire). Worth noting these are more than annotations, they are loan words and are part of the language in daily life.

It's easy to know if you are looking at katakana, and if it is you can expect to be able to sound it out to a foreign word, commonly english. It's very different stylistically to the other two scripts, hiragana and kanji. Much sharper, more masculine but still simple looking.(kanji) 漢字, (hiragana) ひらがな、 (katakana) カタカナ.

Thanks for the links! It's only natural they they started getting put online when internet adoption happened in the mid-to-late 1990s. It's the pre-internet era that interests me the most.

That glass looks half empty to me!? I do hope you get over to Japan and it is all you want it to be.

The real Akihabara is great, so many random used electronics stores! I'll bet you can't go to the basement of one and play with random junked 2010s era flip phones in whatever games you've played!

> I don't want to go to Akihabara at all because I'm sure it will be a disappointment

I am afraid it will be. It was for me: I remember it from 2000-2005, and having visited it a couple of years ago, it was nothing like what I remembered. Mostly dominated by creepy schoolgirl-uniformed girls inviting people into cafes.

When I lived in Japan, Akihabara was a regular destination, as I had friends who worked in the SoftBank Shop and often enjoyed waiting for them to start their break by wandering around the surrounding alleys, looking at the stuff.

I would love to have a time machine and go back to early 80's, "Nintendo Game and Watch" Akihabara. I somehow feel like the bandwidth has just gotten too overwhelming, it felt like I was going to snow crash with every step past the flyer girls ..

But Tokyo is full of other great things to see and do as well. I've had some amazing times in the second hand synthesizer shops of Shinjuku and Shibura, and escaped moral wounding in Gas Panic, Roppongi too many times to count.

Akihabara is a curiosity, but Ginza and Daiba-park and Koenji are all neighborhoods with exciting things to explore too. Nerds looking for satisfaction in Akihabara are going to find it in the nondescript places too ..

First time I have been there was in 2005, last in 2019, and in my opinion it has steadily declined over the years. These huge otaku and tourist stores are boring. And if you have set your hopes too high, then yes, you will be disappointed, but you didn't so you may not be.

All is not lost however. The "electric town" market is still there (or at least it was in 2019). Smaller than it once was, but you are still going to see a mess of electronic components, radios, etc... You will also find small computer hardware shops, including those selling keyboards, which is great since keyboards are something worth trying before you buy.

"Creepy" Akihabara (the 18+ stuff) is also worth seeing, just for the WTF aspect (or more, I won't judge). Go to the upper or underground floors for maximum effect. They usually don't show you this in mainstream video games, for obvious reasons. Maid cafes however are probably exactly like they they are depicted in video games and anime, and personally, I don't find them that exciting, not even that creepy.

Another thing that is lesser known is that there is a nice little shrine right next to the Akibahara we are all familiar with.

If you want electric town feel these days you can go to Shenzhen. That's where it happens now. Of course, that's in China. But that's where hardware is being built and prototyped in the open and you can get any component for anything.

There is no pedestrian bridge that goes all the way to the AKB theater (Donki), if there was it would have to be one of the longest in the world.

Absolutely from the emoji we use every day (which originated in Japan) to the video games I've been playing for the last 35 years I am obsessed with seeing things through a Japanese lens.

I was a few times in Akihabara in the late 90s and absolutely loved it. Those narrow alleys packed with electronics shops selling every niche product you could think of, backed by some huge electronic stores. Also, game arcades were still a big thing and the whole manga and anime insanity had not take off. Around 2012 I visited it again with my family and was a bit disappointed. It was much less techy and many cool electronics shops had turned into mange/anime shops. Well, I guess times will never stop changing.

Akihabara has pivoted from electronics into anime. Most all of the hardcore electronics stores (eg Radio City) are long gone, in their place you have massive emporia catering to otakus, ranging from maid cafes to doujinshi.

The (newish) Yodobashi store at Akiba is still one of my go-tos if I need to pick up gadgetry on trips to Japan, but in these days of easy online ordering of anything I need at rock-bottom prices from China, that's not very often.

There's lots to do in Japan, nothing needs to be excluded.