Day 3 Part 1 Monday 2025 05 19 Akihabra

Today is the day we hoof it out to Akihabra, a nerd's dream we are told. Geeks flock from the world over to get to Akihabra! I'm mildly excited, I'm a nerd, I say to myself. And yes, yes I am. This is self evident.

We hoof it on over there, walking along the path of the rail, which has shops embeddded in the base of it, retail square footage being the rarity that it is, I suppose. Nothing quite catches my eye again and again as much the small cute, cars, more so when they are small, cute vans carrying things all over the city, supposedly to the small cute business, etc etc you get the idea. 

What is coolest about these little vehicles is that it's exactly how much you need for the job, no more, no less. You are travelling less than 50km in the city over flat ground, a bunch of packages. You don't need four wheel drive and massive  clearance and fog lights and whatever else gets puts into some SUV monstrosities. You need an engine, hopefully as small as possible, and enough space to carry your packages. It all appeals to the sensible part of me. They also look like they could be driven by a Disney character and nobody would bat an eye. 

We get there and the kids scamper off together to get whatever it is that kids get at Akhihabra. Hopefully nothing that would embarrass both us and them should we find it. But they are to stick together and it's only with the mildest of trepidation that we let them go.

My wife isn't particularly excited about anything nerdy or geeky except maybe me but that is certainly an aspect of my personality she'd rather pretend is not there. Like my love of graphical tees featuring science fiction icons or my ridiculously over engineered split key ergonomic keyboard, or, well the list goes on. 

So our first stop is the venerable Yodobashi Akiba. A monolith. A towering edifice to electronics. 8 floors of wires and transistors and all sorts of goodies for people who care about prime lenses, or 'true 8k definition', or 'cherry MX switches'. You get the idea. 

I wander in and, yeah. It's as billed. It has everything. Or nearly anything that could run on electricity. Just this section alone, that featured shredders, paper shredders, seemed aggressively thorough. You could cover up decades worth of malfeasance just on the clearance shredders alone. 

So my thinking is, sure, I got a nerdy keyboard (weirdly, all my personal blogging is inevitably on my chrome book, which features the sort of chiclet tinny laptop keyboards that I would never deign to think about considering to write on) for my work, but what if there was an even NERDIER one? Could my ergonomics be even more ergonomicy? I could stave off my inevitable arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome by, 3, 5 months over my lifetime if I could just get the riiiight setup.

So I trudge up to the third floor, where PC peripherals are. And there they are, a phalanx of keyboards. Mechanical, naturally. Different switch types, just solid keyboards. They even have a separate section for GAMING keyboards, which, I assume set themselves apart from the work keyboards by having too many RGB lights, and cool sounding names that seem to be the rejected names for the sort of short lived special forces squad where their next of kin never qualify for military benefits, because they were never in the military, and were never in Argentina during that particular questionable coup, either.

But no split keyboards? No isolinear cap placement? Some niche s of nerdery, it seems, is too niche for this shop. 

Slightly worried about my unhealthy interest in keyboards, I wander some more. And realize, for all the selection of, well, everything, I don't really want anything, to be honest. And buying something 'just because I'm there' feels deeply icky. So I find another place to wander in.

Super potato. A shop that's, quite self explanatory, really, a retro gaming mecca. Old Super Nintendos, Segas, cartridges for them, Dreamcast, everything an old school gamer could want.  It's accesible through a side street through a narrow hallway up a dodgy elevator.  Everything is packed right in and features rare finds that I'm sure the right collector would absolutely lose their cool over. What, collecting vintage GameBoy Color! cartridges is a super cool hobby, I'm told. 

I wander through, rather quickly. Because then I realize, oh yeah, I never grew up with a console, all my gaming was on a PC. Usually well worn shareware demos. It's an easy sell to parents that we should get a PC for 'schoolwork' and the like, much harder to justify why Yoshi is going to help me get through algebra. So no actual memories or attachment to the litany of games that make up Japanese console gaming

My partner is off fighting through the chaos that is Don Quijote, voluntarily. I guess that's preferable to wading through the morass of nerd. The kids are off, doing whatever teens do. So I decide to find someplace that I would actually want to go to. Yes. A keyboard shop. 

It's only a 15m walk so I make my way through. It's off the beaten track's beaten track. In what looks to be a mixed residential/office supply/generic building .. area. I was never, apparently, cut out to be a city planner, or architect. It was not the usual techy consumery area, in any case. 

But find it I did. Split keyboards. Ergonomic mechanicals, custom printed jobs. It was preeetty rad, let me tell you. But rad enough to shell out the money only to realize I can't rebind the keys, or the firmware installation manual is all in Japanese? All which would require me to chat with the clerks? The math wasn't mathing for me. 

I'm in need of a washroom, and sure, I could dip into the nearest McDonalds, but a viewing of the super excellent film 'Perfect Day', about a washroom cleaning attendant in Japan, made me look for a public washroom. And yes, this was the sort of movie you'd call a 'film'. Super chill with many backstories and histories alluded to, started, and never finished. But the guy just seemed super happy, doing his job, taking the small pleasures in life.

I find the washroom is surrounded by a small park, right in the hustle and bustle of Akihabra. The contrast of sensory overload and consumerism with the sudden quiet, the waving trees, the what looks to be an abandoned (but probably just sleepy and underutilized) volunteer fire department, was wonderful.

The family finally all gets back together and I get them all Taiyaki, a filled fish shaped pastry, a lot like a waffle in it's consistency. I was told that Tokyo does custard very well, so I got four filed with custard. We all went back to that park and chilled, looking over their loot and finds. 

Except me, I never got around to buying any keyboards. Yet.