As someone who finds magic and inspiration at every turn in Tokyo, I yearn for the golden years of Akihabara, aka "Electric Town," the city's electronics district where there were countless shops packed with the latest consumer goods and a maze of tiny stalls that sold capacitors and resistors by the kilogram. These days, it's primarily office buildings with occasional computer stores, arcades, otaku shops, and a few hidden vestiges of the old electronics bizarre.
Filmmaker David Hoffman visited Akihabara in 1993 which was early in its transition and documented it on, yep, videotape.
"It seemed to me at the time that they were pretty far ahead of us in terms of the variety of electronic devices, all of which are classics now, and probably highly collectible," Hoffman writes.
(via r/ObscureMedia)
