Tokyo Post #2: At Akihabara

Over the weekend I expanded my wanderings around Tokyo, aided by the Metro. It's easy to use, though I hesitated a bit since it was all Japanese (Greek?!) to me at the entrance. The station lights shimmered tantalizingly while peeking in, I could see entire map displays with names in English neatly written up next to the kanji. But the tickets to travel came from vending machines, and the dispensers had little icons and words in Japanese only! Which dispenser to use for a ticket, how much should I buy? Or should I just get a pass, the kind shown in the picture on my Tokyo Metro pamphlet? One of my business colleagues had mentioned the pass, and then said but you can always get a ticket and if you fall short, just do fare adjustment. That sounded a bit tricky to me...so I asked the gentleman at the station, pointing to the Passnet card in the picture and then at the machines. He nodded, smiling, "ichi-ban, hai!" The first machine looked kind of dead, surely he meant the first one that was all lit up? I went to the second one and pressed a few buttons. Didn't realize there was a touch-screen, ended up with a Y160 ticket. The elderly gent opened a window and poked his head out, talking to someone else. I looked over at the other one, then looking carefully noticed a little Passnet icon on it. Ah so! I pushed another button and it came to life, asking for how much (I took Y1000), then dutifully spitting out my lovely little Passnet card! The gent looked at me, smiling. I smiled back and nodded, hai-hai! arigato gozaimashita! So sorry for thinking too much, stationmaster-san... when you say ichi-ban, it means ichi-ban.

My lovely get-out-of-insanely-pricey-taxi-hell-almost-free card

I took the metro to Akihabara and landed in Laox :-) the mega-mega electronics store (all 7 floors of it, include "overseas floors" for international voltages) and immediately ran into a huge bunch of my peeps - its India Time all the time in electronics land, hai-hai! Outside it was pouring rain, the umbies were all out, and so were costumed girls offering cards for something and smiling at everyone (they were dressed, as Fodor's said, as school-girls and are available to fulfill fantasies of all sorts for the otaku, Japanese geeks. Note to self: why hasn't someone introduced this service in Silicon Valley yet? We have geeks...). There was also this sign, that towered above all the umbrellas...

Yes, it's a billboard showing schoolgirl anime poses

So I looked up otaku, and it's pretty interesting. According to Wikipedia,

The term was popularized in the English-speaking world in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, which has several references to otaku. In particular, the term was defined as 'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'.

In an April 2001 edition of The Observer, William Gibson explained his view of the term: "The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not."

More from Wikipedia on otaku here

Rings true, yes (think about this blog and your's too!)?! And then take a look at this, clearly New York excites a deep fascination within the Eastern imagination (I also noticed a "Times Square" in Hong Kong!):


And in the midst of all this modern stuff...a traditional road-sign, so cool!

Someone clearly provides excellent care and maintenance too

So much to see and then finally I took a break at Mos Burger (HAMBURGER IS MY LIFE" and "Japanese Fine Burger and Coffee") where I had a Mos Rice Burger with Coke - so yummy!

On the way back I hopped off at Ginza (it was raining madly, but I'd taken a raincoat + picked up an umby in the 7-11 below the hotel for 150Y) and as the evening came, the lights kept going on...it was so brilliant, that I kept smiling while zooming into shop after shop...! I've also been to see the Haughty Happy Triplets, that's what I've decided to call the three mega-monster department stores (depatos) - Matsuya, Matsuzakaya and Mitsukoshi. They seem kind of cool in a Juppie (Japanese Yuppie?) kind of way....more later on them...