Games Industry in Akihabara

In Akihabara, the arcades don’t have to be polite. On the contrary, it would be the zakkaya or Ginza stationer who would have to apologise to passersby.

So you can just stroll on into Sega like you’re still on the street – it’s the same world, no threshold to cross.

Crazy when you think about it. The cultural swing to nerdism is so strong that you have a huge chunk of some of the world’s primest prime retail squarefootage – a storeys-deep town of it in a white-hot economic hotspot in the cash-cauldron centre of central Tokyo – barren to anything less hentai than videgames (and ripe for anything in the other direction).

For a marker of the value of this shit, consider the insane cost of it *not* being Apple Stores and Guccis.