Anime, Manga and gadgets galore
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TOKYO — Where else in the world would you find an electronics shop with 8 floors full of gadgets?
One that just happens to be right around the corner from dozens of shops specializing in Anime characters, video arcades, karaoke parlors and cafes and bars devoted to maids, cats and women dressed up in military attire and adorned in guns?
It’s the Akihabara «Electric Town» (Denki Gai) district, nerd central, «like being inside a video game.» That’s how Danny Sullivan, the founding editor of the SearchEngineLand blog describes it on our #TalkingTech podcast tour of the area. «Everything’s making music, everything’s talking, there’s always something going off.»
Akihabara is devoted what the Japanese called otaku —a person (fan boy or fan girl) obsessed with computers and pop culture. Think of it like a New York Times Square—with the same kind of energy and non-stop people, but add in larger buildings, where nearly everything’s a cartoon or gadget store. (Remember that Japan is where Pokemon, Nintendo and Sony were all created, and geek culture is revered.)
While the main street of Chuo-Dori are lined with stores for Sega, Yahoo Mobile (a wireless carrier popular in Japan) , and even DVD rental stores, many focus on T-shirts, cups and other knick-knacks based on Japanese pop bands or comic book and video game characters.
The streets are full of folks handing out flyers to get you into their stores. In the photo below, a woman urges a passerby to stop into a Maid Cafe, where the waitresses are dressed as….maids. A woman with an iPad strapped to her belly shows off photos of felines to get you upstairs to a Cat Cafe. There are also Manga cafes, where customers can surf online, read comics and watch DVDs.
And then there are the gadgets. The eight-floor Yodobashii-Akiba mega-store is right off the Akihabara subway line, and it’s like a Best Buy—but way bigger, spread across multiple floors. In the U. S., New York’s B&H Camera is considered one of the largest of its kind, but Yodobashi is like B&H times 8, and more diverse. There’s cameras, computers, memory cards, steamers, lighting, refrigerators, mobile phones, clothing and more. Like a place to buy sushi, and an outlet of Tower Records, the record store chain that closed the retail stores in the United States back in 2006. (Tower’s international division was split off before the U. S. company went bankrupt and still lives on in Japan.)
Step into Yodobashi and there’s a nice touch—when you enter the giant shop, a charging station for your (probably) dead smartphone awaits you. For about $1, you can get juiced up while you browse.
We expected to find camera prices lower—after all, the companies that make them are based here, and they are produced in Asia. Subtract shipping and export pricing, and surely there would be $100 to $200 savings, right? Sadly, no. The prices seemed to be about on par with what we pay in the United States, if not just a bit higher. The Canon 5D Mark IV is $3,500 in the U. S., but was actually more expensive, around $3,600. The Sony A6500 camera is $1,400 in the United States, but selling for just around $1,465 at Yodobashi. What they have, in this Internet age, is everything. Want to see the difference between a Panasonic GH5 and the Sony A7SII? Yodobashi has it—along with every conceivable part and the shopping as entertainment experience.
A great sight to see—unlike U. S. retail, which is having trouble attracting foot traffic, the gadget shops in Japan are packed with customers. Yodobashi, which has 15 stores in Japan, is also big in online sales- -no. 2 to Amazon in Japan, but it’s sales are ten times less than the giant e-tailer.
What’s it like to shop at Yodobashi in person? Listen in, as Danny Sullivan and I tour Yodobashi and podcast our audio findings: https: //soundcloud.com/jefferson-graham/from-japan-visiting-the-worlds-biggest-tech-shop
ICYMI, here’s the complete roster of our #TalkingTech coverage from the Japan trip.
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