Homesick for Akihabara

World Order’s Have A Nice Day video is just Akihabara—robotlike precision cutting through all that tangled chaos, Genki Sudo moving through the district like it’s written into his code. Watching it made me realize I’m nostalgic for a place I don’t actually live, which is the weirdest, best kind of homesickness.

Akihabara isn’t technically my favorite Tokyo neighborhood—that fluctuates between Shibuya, Harajuku, Shimokitazawa depending on my mood—but it’s the one that stays with me. Super Potato gets you in the door if you care about old game hardware. The real draw is the density: five floors of cheap electronics stacked on top of each other, pachinko parlors running constant mechanical screams, and the sex shops where you can flip through magazines with schoolgirls illustrated on every cover. No apology about any of it. That’s what I like about Akihabara.

I took Christine around once, showed her the weird corners where you feel like you’ve stepped inside someone else’s obsession. Another time I gave a homeless guy 2,000 yen and some onigiri and a beer. The sheer strangeness of the place makes you want to be decent to people.

I know every street in that small universe now, every corner. Watching them shoot the video through those streets, watching all that otaku culture get compressed into precisely choreographed movement—it felt like watching my own weird private memories get set to music. That’s the real magic of it.