Eric Hsu posted on February 09, 2007 03:05
Continued from yesterday's post...scroll down for part 1.
So after the maid cafe, we were walking down the street and we saw this 4 story building dedicated to old school video games. We all love Donkey Kong, Galaga, Space Invaders, and Asteroids right? Perfect for the 30 something year old otaku in us so we went to check it out. The first floor was old school game consoles like the original JDM Nintendo Famicom. The second floor was the middle school shit like the PS1,Sega, Colecovision, Intellivision, etc. They even had some Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 400/800/1200 stuff. The 3rd floor was used new school games and old school J music. The 4th floor was old school game consoles. Like an arcade. They had all the cool games from when we 30-something year olds were growing up. I played some Donkey Kong and Dig Dug, while Gary played some other old school games. That was a quick blast from the past.
So we leave that building and start walking down the main street in Akihabara where they have people speaking all kinds of languages trying to get tourists to come in and buy electronic shit they don't need. We cruise through the alleyways and find these small passages where any electronics nerd, or Otaku in this case, can find whatever electronics component he needs: capacitors, connectors, resistors, molexes, etc. I wish I had a pic (this post was an afterthought). But then we come to this one store that has some maid dresses in the front and some S&M toys. I don't mean sex toys, but I mean dolls all S&M'd out. So we had to check this out.
Now in this store there are no kids. There are no women. Only dudes. Strange right?
Gary was jockin the little princess outfit. He didn't know I was standing behind him when I snapped the pic. I didn't know there were Filipino Otakus.
One floor was all anime toys. They even had the old school shit like Macross, Yamato, Transformers, Megazone, etc. There's gary getting all happy again. We went up to the top floor, but I don't think anything was going to prepare us for these goodies:
The figurines of scantily clad female figurines is pretty trippy. I mean what are you going to do with these figurines/toys? If you look at the pic right above, you'll see figurings of high school girls tied up with a mirror underneath to see up her panties. We were all like, "DUDE CHECK THIS OUT!!!" As cool as it is, you gotta admit it's a bit twisted too. 
Then there's all the maid outfits you could want to buy for your, uhhh....., self? I'm sure some Otaku have girlfriends that they can dress up and play with.
Last, but not least, what would any hardcore Otaku toy store be without these life sized figurines?!?!
That's about it for Akihabara. I had a meeting I had to head back to the Auto Salon for so we all split up until later that night to party. I'm sure that not all Otaku are as bad/trippy/twisted/lost in fantasy as much as they may seem from my tour of the toy store and maid cafes. The elecronics stores, the maid cafes, the sidewalk shows with Otaku cheering the female perfomers in maid dresses on (watch JDM Insider: The Kanto Tuners for this one), the trippy ass toy stores, etc. all make up Akihabara. Otaku heaven? I don't know, but it's a trippy culture.