April 17, 2025: If you’re viewing this post from my website, yes I completely and purposely superimposed Star Wars onto the feature image JR Akihabara sign. And terribly I might add, but that makes it all the more glorious, in my own little world at least! Anyway, we headed to Akihabara, another district of Tokyo, after our Shinjuku shenanigans. This area is known as a hub for video gaming, electronics, and manga (where in Tokyo isn’t, haha!)
This was our train from Shinjuku to Akihabara. I lost count of how many cars are on this thing. It has a few more than Calgary’s typical three car trains, I think:
Our view while wandering from the train to our Akihabara destinations:
We didn’t spend a lot of time here in fact, there was really only one shop in the area on our ‘Must Go’ agenda: KOTOBUKIYA. We knew about this company well before visiting Japan, as it makes and sells high-end collectible figures and statues, including many movie and video game characters that we all know and love. Lots of Star Wars! I could have filled up my suitcase here. There was also a TON of manga merch in here, but I guess that’s to be expected!
Sigh, no pictures of the inside of the store! I guess I was just too excited at all there was to see. I refrained from buying any figures or statues. Real estate in my suitcase was extremely limited, and this merch is not the kind of stuff you want to pay for and then take out of the box and risk breaking!
I did pick up some beautiful ‘Made in Japan’ Star Wars tapestries though, surely not made by KOTOBUKIYA, but I found them in their shop nonetheless. We did see these and additional designs in other places around Japan. I really need to put them up, but unfortunately wall space in my condo unit is also extremely limited:
There were these little game stores everywhere we went, with tons of toy vending machines, where you put in your money and it spits out a random toy. Random but themed to the machine itself! I’ve seen these things gaining popularity in North America and have seen them appearing at various conventions, including the Calgary Expo. We searched a bunch of these shops and finally found a Star Wars themed machine, probably the only one in all of Japan, haha! Star Wars was not popular in these stores, but if you love Pokémon, Hello Kitty, and other anime or manga, they’ve got you covered!
That’s it for Akihabara! A map of the general area where we spent our time:
