Photos I took of Akihabara while visiting Japan in 2019! It took me a while to publish these - so much fun.
footage of me trying to get into the Ghibli museum in Tokyo
On the day I went to visit Akihabara, I took a train earlier in the morning to the Ghibli museum on the other side of Tokyo. Sadly I couldn’t get into the museum because I had no advance tickets. It was like that moment in Final Fantasy 9 where Vivi can’t get into the opera because his tickets are fake.
With sad feelings of “No Tickets for You” I went to Akihabara in a sort of dejected state, only to fall in love with it deeply. It was like getting romantically rejected by the prom king only to find out that the raver kid writing poems in the corner of class is The Actual Fucking Best. I went back to Akihabara two more times in my ten-day trip to Tokyo.
Inside the shops in Akihabara there was just … so … much … stuff. I couldn’t believe how many things there were, how many characters I didn’t recognize.
I felt like I had gone into a coma and while I was sleeping, Pokemon had been invented, pogs had come and gone, and Harry Potter had gone through all seven books, but I hadn’t been around for any of it, and all of it was coming at me like a Hokusai tsunami of pop culture. I didn’t have a chance and ended up spending something like $500 on things that I do not understand.
I like the things I bought, but I don’t know exactly why!
One of my favorite things I bought in Akihabara was this acrylic stand of Miku, a hologram music performer. Let’s see, how can I explain this …?
Miku is a hologram, but she is kind of like a person, she is an entity, and she was involved in some kind of popup for a race car promotion so naturally I fell in love with ‘Racing Miku.’ Just the fact that she existed made me happy. With Racing Miku on my desk, I feel like I have won some kind of award, the award of trying to understand what Racing Miku is.
In the words of the King in Katamari, Akihabara has a lot of things, yes. I wrote more at length about different parts of Akihabara in the blog below:
Comics and manga culture, and how art is alive in Akihabara:
https://beckyjewellart.com/blog/2019/4/2/animate-in-akihabara
And in other moments all I did was take photos, like this Dragon Quest themed store.
I also loved Harajuku and many yen departed my wallet there.