I've been collecting these on and off since 2019, and there are now more than 20 maps covering almost every year between 1982 and 2001, and the earliest map is from 1976. These show a fascinating transition of shops catering from radio electronics through early microcomputers to consumer electronics and video games of today.
From 1986, when I was living in Tokyo and bought my first computer, until 1999, when I moved to Yokohama, I probably visited Akihabara a couple of times a month on average. I would go there mainly to buy computer and audio equipment, but I also enjoyed just wandering around to see what was available.
In those days, and probably still today, Akihabara was constantly changing. The shopkeepers adapted quickly to trends, and smaller shops in particular seemed to appear and disappear at a rapid pace. Every visit I discovered something new. I contrasted that with another neighborhood I frequented—Ginza—which seemed pretty much the same from year to year.
Your collection brings back a lot of memories. Thanks.
The page has burned through over 45GB of data in a handful of hours! YIKES! So I have just made some image size and quality optimisations and now link out to Internet Archive for the larger versions. Let's see if that slows down data and money usage. Patreon supporters are always welcome! https://www.patreon.com/gingerbeardman
If you have an interest in Japanese but can't commit to learning it, you can have a lot of fun by just learning Katakana (the alphabet used for foreign words like this). You see english words like this all the time, I used it multiple times a day there and it's a neat party trick to read them. I still catch lots of words in the wild even here in Aus.
Surprisingly useful if you travel there! Want some coffee? Well gosh, that's コヒ (kohi). Need a bathroom? Look for トイレ！(toire). Worth noting these are more than annotations, they are loan words and are part of the language in daily life.
It's easy to know if you are looking at katakana, and if it is you can expect to be able to sound it out to a foreign word, commonly english. It's very different stylistically to the other two scripts, hiragana and kanji. Much sharper, more masculine but still simple looking.(kanji) 漢字, (hiragana) ひらがな、 (katakana) カタカナ.
Katakana is also a useful skill in shopping situations. You can often confirm that a product is what you want by reading the katakana on it. This is helpful not only in Japanese stores, but some Chinese situations where Japanese products are popular (eg: health related products).
I always think of this as the dirty little secret of Japanese - that it includes so many English words "hidden" in katakana. If you learn katakana and walk around Tokyo you can probably read about 25% of the text ^_^
That's gikun (義訓), a fun feature of Japanese that's often used and abused in popular culture. For those not familiar there are explanations and examples in this article: https://morg.systems/Gikun
I have a perfect companions for those maps, AKIBA PC Hotline! price report archives: https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/backnum.html. PC Hotline interactive online map is already mentioned in the article, and those weekly price reports are also pretty amazing and put you back in time.
>AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon
Thanks for the links! It's only natural they they started getting put online when internet adoption happened in the mid-to-late 1990s. It's the pre-internet era that interests me the most.
I've played so many video games based in Akihabara that I imagine I know how many steps it is up the staircase and across the pedestrian bridge from the JR station to the theater where AKB48 plays.
I want to go skiing in Japan and go to an onsen but I don't want to go to Akihabara at all because I'm sure it will be a disappointment.
> I don't want to go to Akihabara at all because I'm sure it will be a disappointment
I am afraid it will be. It was for me: I remember it from 2000-2005, and having visited it a couple of years ago, it was nothing like what I remembered. Mostly dominated by creepy schoolgirl-uniformed girls inviting people into cafes.
If you want electric town feel these days you can go to Shenzhen. That's where it happens now. Of course, that's in China. But that's where hardware is being built and prototyped in the open and you can get any component for anything.
First time I have been there was in 2005, last in 2019, and in my opinion it has steadily declined over the years. These huge otaku and tourist stores are boring. And if you have set your hopes too high, then yes, you will be disappointed, but you didn't so you may not be.
All is not lost however. The "electric town" market is still there (or at least it was in 2019). Smaller than it once was, but you are still going to see a mess of electronic components, radios, etc... You will also find small computer hardware shops, including those selling keyboards, which is great since keyboards are something worth trying before you buy.
"Creepy" Akihabara (the 18+ stuff) is also worth seeing, just for the WTF aspect (or more, I won't judge). Go to the upper or underground floors for maximum effect. They usually don't show you this in mainstream video games, for obvious reasons. Maid cafes however are probably exactly like they they are depicted in video games and anime, and personally, I don't find them that exciting, not even that creepy.
Another thing that is lesser known is that there is a nice little shrine right next to the Akibahara we are all familiar with.
As to keyboards: Yusha Kobo in north Akihabara has only existed for a few years and is famous among DIY mechanical keyboard enthusiasts.
There is no physical shop like that anywhere else, AFAIK.
When I lived in Japan, Akihabara was a regular destination, as I had friends who worked in the SoftBank Shop and often enjoyed waiting for them to start their break by wandering around the surrounding alleys, looking at the stuff.
I would love to have a time machine and go back to early 80's, "Nintendo Game and Watch" Akihabara. I somehow feel like the bandwidth has just gotten too overwhelming, it felt like I was going to snow crash with every step past the flyer girls ..
But Tokyo is full of other great things to see and do as well. I've had some amazing times in the second hand synthesizer shops of Shinjuku and Shibura, and escaped moral wounding in Gas Panic, Roppongi too many times to count.
Akihabara is a curiosity, but Ginza and Daiba-park and Koenji are all neighborhoods with exciting things to explore too. Nerds looking for satisfaction in Akihabara are going to find it in the nondescript places too ..
The first season of The Naked Director (Netflix) gives a good glimpse of 1980s Bubble-era Tokyo with some great location and set design. The second season is set in the 1990s, and I've not yet watched it.
Softbank Shop, on the 6th or 7th floor, if its still there .. was a veritable oasis of amazingly well-maintained and available super rare synthesizer gear. If I was a wealthy man, that floor would be half-empty .. ;)
The real Akihabara is great, so many random used electronics stores! I'll bet you can't go to the basement of one and play with random junked 2010s era flip phones in whatever games you've played!
The electronics stores are still around, but they are indeed a shadow of what they once were.
An interesting thing to mention is that the otaku culture is also starting to wane, Akiba is slowly relinquishing the title of the Japanese pop culture capital.
What will the next trend for the town be? The jury's still out.
Absolutely from the emoji we use every day (which originated in Japan) to the video games I've been playing for the last 35 years I am obsessed with seeing things through a Japanese lens.
Worry not, OG emoji didn't have those yellow circled smiley faces. Emoji or picture-characters were more for verbs and nouns. It really was iOS that put faces first and then colored it.
Whilst this is still so popular it's melting my server, I added two new maps: one for 1997 and one for 1999. I also added lazy loading capability to help ease the bandwidth usage.
incidentally i visited akihabara just in 2001, however i am curious how it looks today.
in beijing the electronics market which used to have a similar size and feel, shrunk a lot in the past 5-8 years (before covid) due to online ordering becoming more popular. many shops closed their walk-in stores and went online only. already in 2019 what remained was a fraction of what used to be there a few years earlier.
Akihabara has pivoted from electronics into anime. Most all of the hardcore electronics stores (eg Radio City) are long gone, in their place you have massive emporia catering to otakus, ranging from maid cafes to doujinshi.
The (newish) Yodobashi store at Akiba is still one of my go-tos if I need to pick up gadgetry on trips to Japan, but in these days of easy online ordering of anything I need at rock-bottom prices from China, that's not very often.
I was a few times in Akihabara in the late 90s and absolutely loved it. Those narrow alleys packed with electronics shops selling every niche product you could think of, backed by some huge electronic stores. Also, game arcades were still a big thing and the whole manga and anime insanity had not take off. Around 2012 I visited it again with my family and was a bit disappointed. It was much less techy and many cool electronics shops had turned into mange/anime shops. Well, I guess times will never stop changing.
it looks like the decline of electronics shops in akihabara started even earlier than in china. not surprising though. in china on the other hand those stores were not replaced. the malls just emptied out and closed.
Not sure if younger people know how big Japanese electronics were in the 80s and 90s with brands like Aiwa, Nakamichi (look up "Nakamichi Dragon", or even better, try to buy one on Ebay) and Sony (which was like Apple in the 80s). Although Japan still has some great electronics brands, they have been in decline since the late 90s, when China started taking huge chunks of their market share.
Or National which is almost all gone today. Or rather rebranded to Panasonic. Before the early 2000s the company was selling most of their products under National brand in Japan. They've introduced Panasonic to sell speakers abroad because, as it turned out, the National name was not available. The reception was so good over the years that the National brand has been discontinued and all the products are called Panasonic now.
I've learned only today, while double checking the facts, that there is `panasonic` TLD.
Interesting, I though National and Panasonic were just brand names of Matsushita, but the corporation was renamed to Panasonic in 2008. See, that's how old I am :)
good point. that's another factor that i didn't consider. and online sales are having a double effect here. not only is there no need for walk-in stores but there isn't even a need for resellers to import anything but popular products. the rest can be ordered directly from china.
Nowadays with fantranslated ROMs and good enough emulation since the early 00's, I guess there are better things in Japan to do such as visit the actual side of the country beside the pop culture.
Such as the one exposed in Cycling in Japan from the NHK.
Also, meeting different food, tales and cultures beside the ones from the $RANDOM 24/7 store.
