Before Neon Lights: What Tokyo's Akihabara Geek District Looked Like 50 Years Ago

Before Tokyo's Akihabara geek district was laced with neon, it looked like this photo taken circa 1950 which I saw on my recent trip. Despite the cow in the photo, even around this time, gadgets were a part of the trade. (Although as the ads below show, phonographs and vacuum tube radios made up some of the choices.) Doing some research on the area, I did not know that almost 100 years before this time, the area was razed by fires and when it was rebuilt, it was rebuilt with a Shinto shrine on its premises with the name "The extinguisher shrine". People assumed that the Shrine was devoted to the popular deity of fire-control named Akiba, which is the root of the somewhat similar name of the region today. More »

Visiting Thanko's Tokyo Mecca of USB Weirdness

Near a highway, a few hundred feet from the biggest electronics building in Tokyo's Akihabara district, sits a tiny mecca for gadget geeks. The orange store belongs to Thanko, masters of weird USB devices, and it is their first of 4 shops. The blinking raremonoshop sign tickled my eyeballs, but my geek lust was triggered in full by the wall flyers for odd gadgets printed on top of a mosaic of origami paper. More »

Tour Tokyo's Tech Paradise, Now On Google Street View

Google's dutiful camera vans have finished canvassing Tokyo, which means today you can now tour some of the world's most geek-friendly real estate in "electric town" Akihabara without the 14 hour plane flight. The folks at Mars Mag have put together a tour of some of their favorite Linux Maid Cafes, Dream PC builders, arcade palaces and electronics megastores that call Akihabara home. More »