It’s 5:00 PM and you’re walking the streets of Akihabara. Your eyes are immediately drawn upwards into a trap of visual overload. Vibrant reds, blues, and yellows, flashing lights, 30-foot-tall anime posters, and your favorite video game characters are plastered on every piece of architecture in sight. Each building is in a death match with every other building, as they fight for your attention. Before you are able to pick a winner, a businessman in a white-collar shirt and black pants quickly brushes past your shoulder. How long were you looking up for? Were you even walking? You aren’t oblivious enough to stop walking in the middle of a busy sidewalk while staring straight up, right? “Right,” you tell yourself.
An automatic sliding door begins to open to your right. You are immediately hit with a wave of cigarette smoke and chaotic noise. The sliding doors close. You look up to see an unassuming, black building. Your lungs say not to go in, but your curiosity has no concern for your long-term health. You walk in. As soon as you enter, you feel as if all of your bodily functions are shutting down. The smell of smoke suffocates you while you are immediately concussed by a deafening cacophony of noise. This is by far the loudest room you have ever been in, and you’re convinced they have an airplane engine running somewhere in the back. Eventually, you get your bearings and see row after row of blinking, colorful slot machines, each of which has a male occupant. Some of these men are young; some are old. Some are businessmen in dress shirts; some are in baggy T-shirts and jeans. Some seem unhappy with their machine; some seem very unhappy. Before your addictive personality plays pachinko until it loses all the money you need for food during the next four weeks, you exit the premises.
You walk out to a setting sun. The salary-men that roamed the streets earlier are slowly being replaced by young adults and tourists. But the buildings are still fighting for your attention. Your eyes dart to a bright red building with claw machines at its entrance, then to a ten-story building completely covered in advertisements, then to a sign with brightly flashing Japanese characters. Each building amazes you the second you look at it, but you instantly forget its existence once your eyes move to the next attraction.
Then a girl dressed as a vampire-maid-hybrid begins yelling at you in Japanese as she waves a flyer. You have absolutely no idea what she’s saying, so you quickly avert your eyes and dart away. You take no more than five steps before you are approached by another maid who does the same thing, but this time she's a fairy. You then realize they’re everywhere, flanking both sides of every sidewalk. Some are bunny maids, some are unicorn maids, some are maid maids, and one of them has on owl on her shoulder. Each one, without fail, waves a flyer in your face as you walk by. You decide you must take refuge from what seems to be a maid army of the supernatural variety.
You then walk into a tall, white, rectangular building that has about a thousand ads and anime characters populating its entire facade: rather run-of-the-mill at this point. The first floor is completely white. It’s almost like a hospital, but instead of patients, there are claw machines, and instead of doctors, there are teenagers trying to surgically remove a plush toy. You maneuver your way through the machines and up the escalator into a completely new world. The second floor is a department store. There are shelves full of suitcases, watches, cosmetics, and phone cases. The room is so cramped that you have to walk sideways through most aisles. Onto the third floor, which is an anime merchandise heaven. Figurines reside in glass boxes, plush toys hang from the walls asking to be pet, and just about any poster you could ever want is neatly rolled up for the taking. The fourth floor is a full-on arcade, with J-pop blasting from the speakers. You and a few passersby watch a teenager play Dance Dance Revolution. He is the best Dance Dancer you have ever seen.
After leaving this building, you begin to realize that the boring and the normal are now what catch your eye. You begin to seek out the parts of the neighborhood that aren’t all dressed up and decorated. You take notice of what looks to be a rundown house that has been turned into a ramen restaurant. You see a silver office building that houses the Akiba Lab. You watch a businessman buy shawarma from a small Middle-Eastern restaurant, squat down in an alleyway, and eat his dinner. You stare at two small trees and a bush that reside next to the sidewalk. In a place where every last inch is meant to stimulate your senses and grab your attention, these small and boring details are the ones you find the most pleasure in.
As the day winds down and the sun disappears, more and more tourists fill the streets. Nearly all the businessmen have vanished. Small snippets of conversations in English, Spanish, Chinese, and French whiz by your ears as you make your way to the subway station. But Akihabara couldn’t let you leave without one more memorable moment. As you approach the station, you see at least a hundred businessmen crowded on either side of the street in front of the entrance. There are young ones, elderly ones, and everything in between. But they all have one thing in common: each and every one of them is playing Pokémon Go. And with that, you say goodbye to Akihabara and disappear underground.
Comments