In a place like Akihabara, the question of androids suddenly becomes a serious one. After trapesing through old Tokyo, Filip and I headed towards Japan's infamous electronics bazaar, Akihabara. It was about a half mile journey, which included a quick stop at a pachinko parlor and lunch at a noodle shop. I'll try my hand at pachinko next weekend.
Akihabara, which stretches both horizontally down major streets and dimly lit alleys, and vertically up neon clad buildings, truly conjures images of a market from the Middle East. However, in place of silk clad Arabs hawking dates, almonds and fine silk are uniformed Japanese behind stalls of palm pilots, mp3 players, mobile phones and all kinds of technical wizardry. The smaller, more feature filled, the better.
Filip and I stopped in one of the major buildings to see what we could see. Each of the six floors had a theme, one with handhelds and mobile phones in every color (with full color screens!), another with miscellaneous computer parts to build your own machine with the latest and greatest that Taiwan has to offer. There was one floor filled with flat panel televisions bigger than most of the walls in my apartment, sharper than looking out my window; I figured they'd better be for the millions of yen they were going for. Filip and I tested out the new palm pilots from Sony (full color screen, built in mp3 player!), watched a little of Star Wars: Episode I (in Japanese) on a huge flat panel tv and gawked at the ultraportable, fully featured laptops. All in all, it was kind of nice to see six months into the future.