Every Street in the Otaku Universe

After Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shimokitazawa, Akihabara is my favorite neighborhood in Tokyo. Maybe my actual favorite. It’s where you’ll find Super Potato—the best retro game shop in the world, full stop—alongside towers of cheap electronics, multifloor arcade halls, and entire buildings dedicated to manga and adult material, stacked five floors high and completely unapologetic about it. I once brought a homeless man 2,000 yen, a beer, and some onigiri somewhere in those streets, and I walked Christine through the nerdiest corners of the district until she either understood it or gave up pretending to.

World Order, the Japanese performance group led by former MMA fighter Genki Sudo, filmed their video for Have A Nice Day in Akihabara, moving through it in their signature robotic synchronization—stiff-limbed, precise, weirdly moving. They turn the whole district into a kind of theater, which is exactly what it already is. Watching it brought back the specific texture of those streets: the noise, the neon, the smell of fried food and new plastic, the otaku crowd doing their completely self-contained thing. I know every corner of that small universe. It’s good to see it again.