Before Anything Else, Akihabara

Every time I land in Tokyo, I go there first. Before coffee in Shimokitazawa, before the record shops, before anything involving sitting down and recovering—Akihabara, in the east of the city, while I’m still running on arrival energy. Something about the combination of jet lag and neon and the smell of hot electronics makes the whole district feel like a hallucination you earned.

Scotty from the YouTube channel Strange Parts made a video wandering through the district with a camera, and it’s a decent document if you’ve never been—the blinking storefronts, the multilevel shops where every floor gets more specialized and stranger, the otaku moving through it all with the focused calm of collectors who know exactly what they’re hunting. He finds limited PlayStation releases, figures from anime that stopped airing before I was born, car radios from the depths of the eighties. The camera keeps moving because there’s always more.

What video can’t quite capture is standing in a narrow stairwell on the fourth floor of an unmarked building, surrounded by display cases of things you don’t have names for but immediately want. Super Potato—probably the best retro game shop in existence, five floors of Super Famicom cartridges and everything adjacent—is a religious experience if you grew up in the nineties. The Sega arcade on the main drag, where I’ve lost embarrassing amounts of time to Ridge Racer. The AKB48 theater, where a rotating cast of girls in matching outfits performs choreography for fans who have their favorites memorized down to the eyebrow movement—a specific kind of devotion I find both alien and completely understandable.

Akihabara is too much. That’s the point. It doesn’t explain itself or apologize for what it is. You either get it or you’re standing in the wrong aisle.