So, as I mentioned at the end of my last update, yesterday afternoon saw me head across to Akihabara, Tokyo’s famous manga, anime, gaming and electronics area, as well as purported red light district.

I realise manga and anime have a huge cult following worldwide, but for whatever reason neither have ever really featured on my radar to date, beyond a vague awareness of their existence – in fact, I only realised manga and anime weren’t actually the same thing in the course of reading up for this trip*. Personally, the only ones I could name would be Spirited Away, Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon (I think?) – not that I’ve ever watched any of them at all. Unless you count Pokémon, that is, where I do admittedly have a working knowledge of the OG cast of characters – people and Pokémon – and know all the words to the original theme tune. I’d blame my little nephew (Pokémon obsessed) for this, but for the fact that this decidedly superfluous knowledge was in fact garnered through frequent hangover viewing of SMTV Live (with a young Ant and Dec!) back in my student days…

Similarly, my gaming phase pretty much started and ended with Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog in their early iterations – though I do also recall a bit of Alex Kidd and prototype Duke Nukem / Mortal Combat also in the mix back in the day as well… Unless Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, Solitaire, Sudoku, Minesweeper and Scrabble count as gaming proper these days…? I saw precious little evidence even of their mere existence at Akihabara, so am guessing that is very much not the case here…! 😉 )

Still, several million Japanese (not to mention legions of devoted fans worldwide) can’t all be wrong – and the place was certainly popular!! I had a bemused, but mainly mystified, wander through the various arcades, gaming centres and manga stores here – my one point of even vaguely familiar cultural reference being the 80s and 90s retro gaming shop Super Potato. This place had all the old school GameBoy and Master System etc. type games, and was even selling a real-life 16-bit Sega Mega Drive, which certainly brought back memories (mainly of fighting my younger brother for a turn…!).

Obviously the ‘adult shops’ here were somewhat less, shall we say, impenetrable (for want of a better term!) to the outside observer – in so far as no culturally specific prior knowledge was required here (bar that of the meaning of octopus tentacles, perhaps…).

That being said, one of the quirks of Akihabara is the many young Japanese girls dressed as ‘cutesy’ maids plying the streets here, inviting passers-by to be waited upon at a local “maid café” – for an absolutely extortionate drink and cover price, of course. My (very third-hand) understanding here is that the maids are considered more ‘entertainers’ in (an admittedly weird and f*cked up version of) the old geisha tradition, whereby guests are attentively served, conversed with and overall just gently entertained etc. (and I don’t mean that euphemistically here, or at least I don’t think I do…?). But what the hell do I know…? After all, it wasn’t like I was about to pay the cover charge to find out either… 😉

Which pretty much wraps it up for Akihabara – to my disappointment, I didn’t find any of those famous vending machines of used ladies’ panties on my wanderings either. If they were anywhere in Tokyo though, Akihabara is definitely where they would be…

Anyway, Tara and Stuart, I know you wanted a bit more sex drugs and rock n roll, so hopefully this goes some way to giving you your fix, at least on the first front… There is of course far worse than I’m posting on here (some of those sex shops got proper sordid), but my Mum and Auntie Anne are reading, so I will leave to your own imaginations here (which I know are both suitably filthy… 😉 ).

Anyhoo, while we’re on the subject of the weird and wonderful, here are some other odds and sods I have encountered on my travels over the last few days.

First of all, we have the insanely wonderful (or wonderfully insane?) Gotokuji cat temple, which for reasons unknown features multiple cat statues at the gates of an otherwise non-descript cemetery in a totally random residential district (side note: please please please please bury me here).

We also have: the steampunk style Gigli Giant Clock; a life-sized plastic Hello Kitty; a disembodied Easter Island style head; a giant gorilla statue (another one seemingly just plonked down at random in the middle of nowhere); a much photographed monument to Hachiko (a famous Japanese dog, apparently…); a stack of the many and varied local flavours of Kit Kats; an overly alarmist Japanese public information poster; and some random toilet instructions (both for Western and Eastern style alternatives – in case you ever get confused either way…).

And that about wraps it up for Tokyo, which has been an absolutely brilliant start to the trip! Next stop: Kyoto via bullet train tomorrow!

PS: I’ve only just clocked that Tokyo and Kyoto are anagrammatic. Had anyone else out there other than me completely failed to notice this fact to date….?? How stupid do I feel.

* For those similarly ignorant, apparently manga is the art form in book / comic format and anime is tv / film. A lot of anime is based on manga, but not all, and neither is all manga rendered into anime. So there you go: every day’s a school day!