Name: Tokyo Eye 2009 | AKIHABARA Shopping, Electronics & Robots #140
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T14:55:13.000Z
Duration: 29 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

Akihabara first came to fame as the world's biggest and best electronics district.

Today, Akiba, as insiders call it, is equally well-known as the center of otaku culture.

The imperative

The super guide will tell you all you need to know to get your geek on in Akihabara.

Hello, I'm Chris Buffer and welcome back again to Tokyo Eye, the world's number one guide to Tokyo.

Now, today we visit Akihabara. In the studio we have John and Kevin. How are you guys doing today?

Now, Kevin, you're an old pro on Akihabara. Tell us about it.

Well, I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I do have this map. And Akihabara is what we call Electric Town.

It's the best place for finding any electronic goods anywhere in the world, I'm sure.

Now, John, are you familiar with Akihabara?

I've been there a number of times, but never really this in depth before.

I did my best to show him everything I could.

Yeah, this time we enlisted the help of a specialist who knew a lot of the nooks and crannies of Akihabara.

John's guided tour of Akihabara is set to begin any minute now.

Well, you know, I'm always genki. I'm a very energetic kind of guy. I'm Goku, so pleasure to meet you.

That's right. This guy is John's guide for the day.

His name's Patrick, and he's an authority on all things Akihabara.

He researches and writes about the place all the time.

Isn't it embarrassing to be seen with this guy?

Akihabara's main thoroughfare is lined with giant electronics retailers.

But Patrick's tour starts off with an intro to what Akihabara is all about.

They walk the length of the main drag to the edge of the district.

Could you tell me, why are there so many big brand electronics stores here?

Well, it didn't used to be this way, of course.

Actually, if you look right over there, you see the bridge, that's Manseibashi Bridge.

That used to be the east entrance to Edo, old Tokyo.

So this whole area here used to be kind of a crossroads.

People would be coming into the town, the ancient capital.

So this whole area here was kind of like a crossroads thing going on there.

And in 1890, they built a railroad way, an extension to the railroad tracks to here.

So people started selling fruits, vegetables, things like that on this crossroads.

And then slowly this became more about radio parts, electronics.

And after World War II, this whole place kind of became a black market.

All the way from here to Ueno was this big sprawling outdoor black market.

Patrick expounds on Akihabara's history from his encyclopedic knowledge.

Once you get him started, there's no stopping him.

So basically that high density of electronics stores drew in a whole bunch of people after World War II.

And sure enough, the reputation built, more stores came in, and now this is what you have.

There was a big electronics boom in the 60s and 70s, and Akihabara had about 10% of the national market at the time.

So now we know about Akihabara's long and interesting past.

How did it become the otaku holy land that it is today?

Inside this building is one shop that sparked the transformation.

This is Kayodo. Kayodo is a famous model maker from Osaka.

They used to make like toys for cereals, like giveaway toys for food and so on and so forth.

They had a showroom in Shibuya in 1997, and they moved it here to Akihabara.

When they did that, there's this huge influx of otaku activity following them here, and also a lot of stores, a lot of things like that.

In this series, Evangelion was very popular at the time.

So these are the two things, Kayodo and Evangelion, that really transformed Akihabara.

So this is really a very sacred kind of space. Let's go inside and take a look.

The shelves are lined with amazingly detailed figures and models.

This shop caters to serious hobbyists, Akihabara's core constituency.

So this, you can actually build your own?

They're showing you what you can do with it.

Then you buy the different pieces over here, and then you can build your own thing.

So you could make your own, just totally a new original character?

These aren't for sale though, but just to show you what it's like.

If you buy the parts over here, then you can do that.

The different parts here, the different, like trading out things, different figures.

From this mountain of parts, you can assemble your own creation.

You buy the parts you need, and put them together at home.

Yeah, Patrick, how long have you been living in Japan?

I've been living here for five years now, since 2004.

And what's your interest in, well, how did you get started in this, into this culture?

In the beginning, I was just a real diehard fan of Japanese anime.

I was living in Alaska, and my brother was learning Japanese, and there was these tapes that would be coming through the Anchorage Airport.

So like tapes of Japanese animation with basically just the original Japanese.

We tried to translate them and understand what was going on, but for me it was like so new and special and different and things like that.

He's going to ride that bike, but there's a guy on it.

Patrick is a true otaku. That's a pretty cool creation.

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Tokyo Eye 2009 | AKIHABARA Shopping, Electronics & Robots #140

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