A day in Akhibara (Tokyo’s Electric Town)
I, like I’m sure most of you, grew up on computer games. The green haze of Safari Hunt on the Master System is the only thing that keeps me company on many lonely nights. I wondered, even at a young age, where the hell all this was coming from. It certainly wasn’t Sidcup. Growing up, he was an avid Sega Power reader despite his preference for the Mega Drive (which I didn’t own until I was 15) and would occasionally appear in an article or report about Tokyo, considered by many to be the birthplace of video games. (although some Americans disagree…).
The articles featured a blur of neon lights, hundreds upon hundreds of arcade machines, and thousands of young Japanese men playing games we barely recognized. For a nine year old this place seemed like heaven.
Finally, twenty-three years later, I managed to visit my good partner Dave. Tokyo is everything you’d expect it to be, with hidden treasures around every corner, it’s impossible not to walk around, gaping, muttering “Oh my God.” The place considered to be the center of Tokyo’s geek culture is Akhibara (basically known as Akiba to Tokyoites). The Lonely Planet guide suggested an afternoon there…
Dave and I spent a full day there, and if time wasn’t a factor I could have spent many more days immersed in its awesomeness.
The first thing that struck me about Akiba (except for the lights, so many lights…) was how accessible it was and how much there is, all within easy reach. There’s a shop at the train station, for God’s sake! The stores are all five-story wonders. And I like their trading/battle cards. When you say “Japanese stickers” in the UK, what do you immediately think of? pokemon right? Mistaken! I counted more than ten shops on a street in Akiba dedicated to selling all kinds of stickers. Did you have any idea what it was about? In the least! Some of these cards, individually, retail for close to £100. I saw some cards in English, just with some words like “skip a turn” or something you might see on a Monopoly card, and they were over 40,000 yen (£200).
Before the intense shopping started, we had to try some of these arcade machines and boy! One problem, everything is in Kanji. As long as you can work your way through the menu screens, there’s plenty of fun to be had.
Dave found this great blast game from Square Enix, but poor menu decisions led him to follow a ten minute tutorial. Not bad for 100 yen (60p). Regardless of the game, everything costs 100 yen. Remember those dance mat games? Here they love them, but there is no mat, no, no, there is a touch screen that you have to break with your hands or about ten buttons, that you have to break with your hands. The hand-eye coordination of some of these guys was impressive. Bullshit, there was a dance game, but the kid was dancing on both sets of squares, nailing what two people would fight.
Japan’s love affair with RPGs has never been more prominent than it is here. Ridiculous money on battle cards aside, 50% of the games on the arcade were RPGs, or at least action games with a heavy RPG bias. Although games like the earlier Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star were considered strong, neither sold as well in the UK and only a small part of the Japanese market was translated into English. In the last ten years alone, Nintendo and Square have bothered to treat the Western gamer to the entire Final Fantasy series. If this kind of arcade sounds too overwhelming, head over to Super Potato (brilliant, brilliant name) for plenty of old-school arcade machines, including early versions of Street Fighter 2 and Golden Axe. So now to shopping. In my head I envisioned rows and rows of 8-bit and 16-bit games, consoles, bargain bins full of “classics” and you know what? It did not disappoint.
What you’ll need to quickly get over is the fact that only the handheld stuff is region-free, everything else is Japan-only.
You also have to get stuck in as casual reading of the game’s backbone becomes impossible because it’s all in kanji. You can’t move all over the Famicom (NES) and Super Famicom (SNES) equipment, I mean, it’s everywhere! You can buy a second-hand Famicom for around 4,000 yen (£20) or a Super Famicom for a little more. Which seems worth it, as you can get arcade/platform games that never released here (as well as streams and RPG streams you’ll never figure out). Here came my next revelation, Sega’s relative paucity of options. I saw about four Mega Drives for sale all over Akiba and they retailed for 10,000 yen (£50) and the Master System I saw was 20,000 yen (£100 – second hand, first build, boxed) with the games to almost 3000 yen. My dream of collecting a lot of MS loot died at that point… I’ll talk about Sega’s ups and downs in another article, but its lack of impact in the home entertainment sector could be explained by its focus on arcade machines which was very evident in Akiba.
I could go on and on, but the same goes for any other adventure you go on, Akiba is what you do. Whether you prefer to raid bins of deals for Famicom games or hang around the streets drinking canned coffee from a vending machine while looking at scantily clad Japanese girls in cleaning cafes, Akhibara is a must for any video game fan.
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