During our first visit to Tokyo in summer 1988, Kristin and I were sitting with a friend in a park. I remarked that for library research I’d like a scanner that could run over the surface of a book and store the text or print it out somehow. Our Japanese friend Komatsu Hiroshi said brightly, “I know where they sell that.”
He took us to Akihabara, and in one store a bored salesgirl stood at a table routinely running a handset over Japanese text. The gadget spit out a strip of characters, like a cash-register sales receipt. I didn’t buy one, largely because it was doubtful that I could ever get replacement print cartridges, but ever since then, Akihabara has stood as my emblem of geek paradise. There, the future is on sale today, and everybody becomes an otaku.
So what a pleasure to get Mark Schiling’s report [1] on the neighborhood, and its relation to the anime on view in the Tokyo Film Festival. I haven’t been back in several years, but this article makes me want to book a flight tomorrow.