Scene: Akihabara 2024
In my chain-health food grocery store, I nearly dropped my Olive Oil hearing music from Skyward Sword. In the summer I heard the main theme from Grandia blaring from Soccer Field Speakers at an Elementary Field Day. In a shopping mall parking lot I heard the costal town music from Nier. In 2024 Urban Japan still believed in video games.
I don’t think that will ever change. That said the ability to buy physical video games has all but disappeared. The Tsutaya right in Shibuya’s Scramble Crossing underwent a renovation this year. It was the flagship store where you could still rent VHS tapes and the hottest music CDs. The second basement was fun to look at video games when passing through. They’d have a large custom display for the new hot release. It was the first place I saw a Playstation Five.
After the renovation finished I went in and like a good video game player immediately checked the directory. The Starbucks was still there. I can’t remember what sales or services they had otherwise because I don’t think I saw any sales and services available.
The major stations still have Game Centers, if you can call them that. A few rhythm games and Mario Kart is what you’ll find if you’re lucky. They are mostly frighteningly loud and bright and full of UFO Catchers. The catchers are filled with anime figures in boxes so large I wonder how anyone owns 3.
I find myself travelling further and further outside Tokyo and Yokohama trying to grasp the lost dream of video games. Dusty stores lined with all the new releases and racks of “old” video games with deliciously reasonable prices. I’ll hold on to the dream just for a moment and walk out with an Asian copy of Def Jam Fight For New York (Xbox 360) and a boxed copy of Sa Ga (Game Boy.)
It was a wonderful feeling when I first moved to Japan to be bathed in video games. There was a game store and an arcade and a BookOff in every station. BookOff frequently didn’t know what it had. Now only BookOff remains, and they know what they got buddy.
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In August I went twice to pay my respects to Friends, right out exit 4 of Suehirocho station. Last year I wrote about it being the end. Now the end was here and as I write this and in the past. The whole building was condemned and torn down. I almost regret not spending 15,000 yen on the sticker insert for Taromaru (Sega Saturn). A single sticker included in the most expensive Saturn Game. If I die no one would know that sticker was worth 15,000 yen.
Both times I must have looked around Friends for an hour. It’s a small store but I knew I’d never see such clean curation again. My eyes darted from shelf to shelf trying to focus on everything in the history of Video Games. I realized far too late in they were playing a music box version of the Mother 2 soundtrack. I’d just played through Mother 1 in Japanese (You don’t need to play Mother 1 unless, you need to.) The poisoned melancoly nostalgia poisoned me. I forgot about buying the Shenmue Maxi-Single. I asked what the CD was. The ojii-san gave me a curt “IT’S NOT FOR SALE.” I must have been the 50th person to ask that question.
The CD in question is a doujin release from 2006 of which there are probably 50 copies in the world. The only way I’ll ever get a copy is extreme luck and diligence in the thousands of CDs that litter a Hardoff Junk bin. So never.
After Friends I walked with misery towards Akihabara Station. The streets were at all times thick with tourists, just like the rest of Tokyo now. Going to Tokyo is now a misery because of how thick the tourists are. Thanks for the economic boost, don’t bring your coffee on the train.
The cramped remaining Game Stores in Akihabara still have the video games, if you look. But you need to buy something when you see it, and pay whatever the mark-up is. Because it is extant and there. The search is barely still there, the bargain hunting has disappeared.
It seems whenever I end up in Akihabara, I’ll end up there two more times. The Friends visits were the later two. The first was actually paying respects.
On June 8th 2009 I went to Akihabara, behind Yodobashi Camera and ate delicious Indian curry and had a completely normal day. I went there with my wife and friends. On June 8th, 2009 a man drove into the closed-off pedestrian streets of Akihabara and stabbed/injured/killed 17 people.
I learned about the incident on the train home as we all said various forms of No Way. It was late July 2024 before I could get out there. Despite it taking place in a very public place, the only thing marking the spot is a hand-written note in Japanese taped to a lamp-post. It sits in front of the large Akihabara Bic Camera. It’s the perfect place for bored Taiwanese women to sit with 15 shopping bags and 20-something Canadian photographers trying to get the perfect Akihabara shot.
I’ll admit it is a personal failing that it took me two hours of passing by to get the guts to ask the Canadian Photographer that had been standing against the poll for 30 minutes taking pictures everytime pedestrian to cross to move so I could pay respect to the dead. I pointed to the weathered in Japanese sign that had been at eye level with him for an hour.
I left an offering of bottled drinks hoping the living would take them. I prayed that I was there unscarred, without trauma. I had a normal day into a normal summer into a normal life. I thanked that I’d arrived at that point in my life without experiencing mass public violence.
I finished. I said thank you to the photographer. I turned around and went up to exit 3 of Suehirocho station and returned home.
Hinge Problems 
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