Akihabara and it's highlight days ended in the very late 90's just after the Dreamcast was released. I'm not joking when I say the Akihabara of the 32 bit days compared to these day was worlds apart. Shit loads of small very interesting store with deals galore. Many shops with a whole floor dedicated to one or two formats. Many many different cool and rare things to see. Now it's bloody F*ing PlayStation and DVDs everywhere ! The PlayStation really fucked up the good old days when shops would have shelves of different stuff. Now it's PlayStation in the face with everything else shoved to the back. Also these days you don't seen even half the playable console booths in the streets as there used to be. Stores no longer have those magical floor for each system (mainly PlayStation AGAIN !!). DVD store have replaced those cool little independent stores. I mean, DVD? So what? You can buy them anywhere. Why take over the gaming mecha. Again the boom in cheap PS2 DVD player is to blame. (This is starting to sound like a Sony bashing thread :lol Anyway, if you can cast your mind back to 1999. It was very easy to walk in to a store and find loads and I mean loads of games for the following systems with deals on rare good aplenty - Famicom, Disc System, Super Famicom, Mega Drive and all it's add ons, Saturn, Dreamcast, MSX, X68000, PlayStation, (Not really any PS2 stuff yet), Neo Geo, Neo Pocket, Wonder Swan, Game Boy etc.... THere were also some pretty cool knock off stores with stuff such as Chinese multi carts , mod chips and those Game Axe things! I even saw a Top Fighter once ! Now, what do you have? Nothing like that. The magic vanished years ago. Now it's much more corporate. To those who've never been to Akihabara it will still seem like a dream but to those of us who visited in the past it will feel more like a broken heart :crying: Yakumo R.I.P. Akihabara Department Store Curry house.
Rule #1 about Metroplis: Note that most of the articles aren't totally accurate. This is the magazine that had a cover story saying "MP3 is here!" when the iPod was released. The ironic thing is that Akiba is more deviant now than it was 10 years ago. All that shit has become a tourist trap... a big one. If city officials are too stupid to milk that cash cow, they deserve to turn it into yet another renovated part of Tokyo which caters to business people and eventually falls into economic slump b/c another place down the street does. Japanese are fickle. 5 years ago companies were poking out eyes to get into Roppongi hills. Now they're doing the same to get out and go 1 mile down the road to Midtown. The only thing halfway fun on the Akiba side of town is Ueno. It really doesn't have a prayer at become a hotbed of entertainment in any other form than it's present. Not for a while, anyway. Why blame the machine? Clearly it's the consumers. The shops stock what sells, plain and simple. There's just not enough space to sell really old games... they keep it at current and last gen, and make a good profit. This is a trend found in just about every nook of the mom & pop industry. Akihabara's change isn't unique in any way, shape, or form. It all blends together. There is no "naughty" part. There's hentai shit in most stores, and the maid cafes (or more importantly, the girls flyering said establishments) are at random locations. I would like to see Nakano Broadway get some competition. There's only a handful of decent game shops there, and their prices suck cock. I can cycle to it though, which is a bonus.
"economic slump"? like what, detroit? Is hard to imagine a dump like that in japan, specially tokyo... And I know akiba is not divided in that sense (one part games, the other sex) but the article seems to talk about that and not gaming.
Akiba was just cheap to rent a shop in, and as it got more popular, rent went up. Stuff is moving on, that's all, not like they are shutting up and vanishing. I would hardly consider metropolis a good news source either.
No, like Roppongi Hills, like I said. Not a slump, but the building is 5 years old and has vacancies. JP Morgan fucked them one way in as well (and occupy 8 floors), and after JComm, tenants moved out en masse. Sure the JComm thing hurt, but Tokyo Midtown, literally a mile and a half down the street, hurt more. Many of their tenants moved to the new location. Again, fickle. It is a clean city, that is for sure. I'm talking more about funneling HUGE amounts of cash into some project, only to have it at 30% capacity years later. Google "Hokkaido Luxury Ski Resort", sit back, and giggle.
That's the Japanese for you though. They really have a knack for not seeing the future and fucking themselves up all the time. I sometimes truly wonder how on earth Japan became what it was from the days of world war 2. The amount of "WHY???? h: " decisions made is amazing. Yakumo
They are amazing at hiding things. Of course, eventually it caught up with them (Bubble Burst in the late 80s) but by that time, they had already placed themselves as the premiere electronics and automotive giants. The economy is shit compared to the old days, but their savings is astronomical compared to the west (at least the US, where most people are in the red) which is what kept them afloat, to the best of my knowledge, and they've got a good export business. Of course, working people to the bone and paying them nothing also helps.
Does that mean thats cheaper to stay there? or is it almost empty becos they dont want to cut the price of the property?:lol: Lots and lots of savings: people back in the 50s and 60s used to put all the money in the bank becos of stricts laws at the time. Suddently all banks were overflowing with money, so cheap loans for companies and corporations became the norm. Obviously that kind of reckless spending and subsecuent speculation was the main cause of the 80s japanese bubble that almost destroyed the economy in the 90s.
I never quite got why Akiba is a tourist trap. Been there a few times and while I certainly wasn't the only Westerner there, the vast majority of people were locals. Do locals not pay sticker price for their stuff?
Go there in September or summer and you'll see more than your fair share of none Japanese :nod: Yakumo
There's a lot of reasons they want to leave, but it will hardly hurt Mori, the company that owns the place. There's probably 100 buildings called "Mori Building X" in Tokyo. And they own more than just those. Yes Actually, no. The reckless spending is good as it kept the economy going. It was creative book keeping coming to light, and the fact that their TSE (and I assume OSE) model only worked if money was continually pumped into it. When that stopped, the party was over (in a huge way). It wasn't like the great depression, but obviously things changed. Tokyo saw deflation for years, while the rest of the world inflated. Still, the economy was able to support foreign firms sending foreigners over to work there and pay them a sick amount of money. And unlike communism when it dies, Japan still kept pushing out innovation. This counts for a lot. I don't remember the year, but the Osaka Stock Exchange was the first electronic exchange in the world. Of course they didn't update it until (literally) 2006, but hey. When did you go? They've always had tons of duty free electronics shops, but there are far more foreigners there now than before. At least it seems so to this white fucker.
It always seemed to me that Japan lucked out after World War II. China got a communist dictatorship, Korea was split into two, Germany was split into two, but the biggest perpetrators of imperialism and fascim in Asia (Japan) got away pretty lucky despite all the death and chaos they caused, and were smart enough to ally with the free West and get loads of help from them - including national protection from the U.S. Army. Despite that I'd still love to see the country some day, especially Akihabara but more importantly places of historical significance.
It was a few assholes in the government that were responsible for the death and chaos. Imperial brainwashing at it's finest. Throw out the bad seeds, and watch capitalism grow. That wasn't exactly Japan's choice. It was part of the unconditional surrender.
Maid cafes, cosplay, gun fetish stuff and the like. As it's been mentioned, it's not a separate 'part' of Akiba, it's all mixed in together. Japan's greatest piece of luck in the post-war era was Russia not occupying Hokkaido in the last days of the war as everyone expected they would. With America annexing Okinawa until 1972, it would have turned Japan from a bulwark of capitalism in the Far East into a second Cold War-era Germany.
http://www.google.com/search?client...kkaido+Luxury+Ski+Resort"&btnG=Google+s3a|2ch I giggled, but for the wrong reason
