Tarto in Japan

Let's go for the series of posts about my last vacations, and I'll start of course with a Tokyo tour, since I spent 5 days there. I probably have a very distorted about the city because I only had time to scratch the surface (basically, I went once to each ), but at least you'll get my tourist's point of view.

I'll start with Akihabara, just because that's where I stayed for the first couple days, at that capsule hotel. Akihbara is the place to go for everything related to electronics and, as most everything in Tokyo, it is totally huge: a neverending line of shops that range from the tiniest, one-room shop, to the huge, 10-storey department store!

Obviously, the choice is huge: to put it simply, if you're looking for something, chances are extremely high you'll find it there. PC, hifi, photo and video, etc etc. On the other hand, if you're looking for a particular article, you need a good deal of energy to check out all shops and compare prices!

But it's not all, there are also figurine shops:

Costumes (cos-play) :

This one says "DVD, videos, books, games", but apart fro, the first floor that actually has a few games, the other 4 floors are only porn DVDs:

Mangas:

And game centers:

On the other hand, it's not a very lively area at night: no problem to find a place to eat or a game center, but it's definitely not your best bet if you're looking for an area to go out at night. However, its central location in Tokyo makes it a good base to visit the city!

And I recommend you read the related wikipedia article, indeed the district's history is particularly interesting.

And do you know many places where they show special programs about the "Ghosts'n goblins" series:

They even explain techniques to defeat the infamous red demon, one of the hardest ennemies of the whole video game history, those of my generation who frequented the game centers in the 80s will understand what I'm talking about...For those who don't know this cult series, the original game was among the hardest games ever created, and that red demon is still in the memories of more than one player. But hard doesn't rime with Japanese player and I saw a guy in Nagoya completing the game while smoking his cigarette...he wasn't even looking like he was trying. OK, I'm done with my old video game memories, next post about Harajuku!