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Back In Time: Vintage Maps of Akihabara (1976–2001)
- msephton 3y agoWhilst this is still so popular it's melting my server, I added two new maps: one for 1997 and one for 1999. I also added lazy loading capability to help ease the bandwidth usage.
- msephton 3y agoI've been collecting these on and off since 2019, and there are now more than 20 maps covering almost every year between 1982 and 2001, and the earliest map is from 1976. These show a fascinating transition of shops catering from radio electronics through early microcomputers to consumer electronics and video games of today.
- tkgally 3y agoMagnificent! From 1986, when I was living in Tokyo and bought my first computer, until 1999, when I moved to Yokohama, I probably visited Akihabara a couple of times a month on average. I would go there mainly to buy computer and audio equipment, but I also enjoyed just wandering around to see what was available. In those days, and probably still today, Akihabara was constantly changing. The shopkeepers adapted quickly to trends, and smaller shops in particular seemed to appear and disappear at a rapid pace. Every visit I discovered something new. I contrasted that with another neighborhood I frequented—Ginza—which seemed pretty much the same from year to year. Your collection brings back a lot of memories. Thanks.
- msephton 3y agoThe page has burned through over 45GB of data in a handful of hours! YIKES! So I have just made some image size and quality optimisations and now link out to Internet Archive for the larger versions. Let's see if that slows down data and money usage. Patreon supporters are always welcome! https://www.patreon.com/gingerbeardman https://www.patreon.com/gingerbeardman
- tomcam 3y agoYou poor man! But aren’t there a few sites such as Netlify that offer free support to static sites?
- PaulHoule 3y agoI've played so many video games based in Akihabara that I imagine I know how many steps it is up the staircase and across the pedestrian bridge from the JR station to the theater where AKB48 plays. I want to go skiing in Japan and go to an onsen but I don't want to go to Akihabara at all because I'm sure it will be a disappointment.
- ranger_danger 3y agoThere is no pedestrian bridge that goes all the way to the AKB theater (Donki), if there was it would have to be one of the longest in the world.
- msephton 3y agoThat glass looks half empty to me!? I do hope you get over to Japan and it is all you want it to be.
- warning26 3y agoThe real Akihabara is great, so many random used electronics stores! I'll bet you can't go to the basement of one and play with random junked 2010s era flip phones in whatever games you've played!
- eloisant 3y agoI feel like it's a shadow of what it was 20 years ago. So many electronics stores replaced with creepy otaku stores. The electronics market was kind of an alibaba cavern. Well I guess it was bound to happen since now with Internet it's much easier to shop online for weird parts, but it's still sad.
- Dalewyn 3y agoThe electronics stores are still around, but they are indeed a shadow of what they once were. An interesting thing to mention is that the otaku culture is also starting to wane, Akiba is slowly relinquishing the title of the Japanese pop culture capital. What will the next trend for the town be? The jury's still out.
- rasz 3y agoI have a perfect companions for those maps, AKIBA PC Hotline! price report archives: https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/backnum.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/backnum.html. PC Hotline interactive online map is already mentioned in the article, and those weekly price reports are also pretty amazing and put you back in time. For example here you can see first AMD Athlons for sale a full week before official AMD shipping date https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem.... >AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/athlon3.jpg https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/athlon4.jpg https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at... Articles go further back than this list, at least to 97 https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/971128/p_bdy.htm https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/971128/p_bdy.htm You can see prices, lists of shops, vintage photos of equipment sold and vendor stalls. Works well with https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&op=websites https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&op=websites
- msephton 3y agoThanks for the links! It's only natural they they started getting put online when internet adoption happened in the mid-to-late 1990s. It's the pre-internet era that interests me the most.
- refactor_master 3y agoFirst thing that caught my eye is how 地図 (map, in Japanese) is annotated マップ (transliterated “map”, from English). This language is out of control!
- simias 3y agoThat's gikun (義訓), a fun feature of Japanese that's often used and abused in popular culture. For those not familiar there are explanations and examples in this article: https://morg.systems/Gikun https://morg.systems/Gikun
- ehnto 3y agoI've been using Morg's anki decks, The Morg Way, highly recommended so far.
- lbotos 3y agoThanks for sharing this link -- Lots of great Japanese language learning insight on that domain!
- kiisupai 3y agoMany thanks for this link. It's been something that has confused me during my own attempts to read manga.
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- ehnto 3y agoIf you have an interest in Japanese but can't commit to learning it, you can have a lot of fun by just learning Katakana (the alphabet used for foreign words like this). You see english words like this all the time, I used it multiple times a day there and it's a neat party trick to read them. I still catch lots of words in the wild even here in Aus. Surprisingly useful if you travel there! Want some coffee? Well gosh, that's コヒ (kohi). Need a bathroom? Look for トイレ！(toire). Worth noting these are more than annotations, they are loan words and are part of the language in daily life. It's easy to know if you are looking at katakana, and if it is you can expect to be able to sound it out to a foreign word, commonly english. It's very different stylistically to the other two scripts, hiragana and kanji. Much sharper, more masculine but still simple looking.(kanji) 漢字, (hiragana) ひらがな、 (katakana) カタカナ.
- em-bee 3y agoincidentally i visited akihabara just in 2001, however i am curious how it looks today. in beijing the electronics market which used to have a similar size and feel, shrunk a lot in the past 5-8 years (before covid) due to online ordering becoming more popular. many shops closed their walk-in stores and went online only. already in 2019 what remained was a fraction of what used to be there a few years earlier.
- jansan 3y agoI was a few times in Akihabara in the late 90s and absolutely loved it. Those narrow alleys packed with electronics shops selling every niche product you could think of, backed by some huge electronic stores. Also, game arcades were still a big thing and the whole manga and anime insanity had not take off. Around 2012 I visited it again with my family and was a bit disappointed. It was much less techy and many cool electronics shops had turned into mange/anime shops. Well, I guess times will never stop changing.
- em-bee 3y agoit looks like the decline of electronics shops in akihabara started even earlier than in china. not surprising though. in china on the other hand those stores were not replaced. the malls just emptied out and closed.
- jansan 3y agoNot sure if younger people know how big Japanese electronics were in the 80s and 90s with brands like Aiwa, Nakamichi (look up "Nakamichi Dragon", or even better, try to buy one on Ebay) and Sony (which was like Apple in the 80s). Although Japan still has some great electronics brands, they have been in decline since the late 90s, when China started taking huge chunks of their market share.
- anthk 3y ago36yo here. OFC Sony was a synonym of quality. But nowadays you can get decent devices from Shenzhen. And an $100 pinebook can do everything Sony could do in the 80's and 90's.
- bibanez 3y agoA
- abhaynayar 3y agoThere's just something about Japanese culture that leans towards amazing aesthetics.
- msephton 3y agoAbsolutely from the emoji we use every day (which originated in Japan) to the video games I've been playing for the last 35 years I am obsessed with seeing things through a Japanese lens.
- anthk 3y agoEmoticons predate emoji for more than a decade. I used them in MSN/Gaim. Go figure.
- numpad0 3y agoWorry not, OG emoji didn't have those yellow circled smiley faces. Emoji or picture-characters were more for verbs and nouns. It really was iOS that put faces first and then colored it. 1: https://www.docomo.ne.jp/service/imode_mail/function/pictograph/ https://www.docomo.ne.jp/service/imode_mail/function/pictogr...
- msephton 3y agoThat's right, I used emoticons on USENET in the mid 1990s, but emoticons are not emoji.
- anthk 3y agoNowadays with fantranslated ROMs and good enough emulation since the early 00's, I guess there are better things in Japan to do such as visit the actual side of the country beside the pop culture. Such as the one exposed in Cycling in Japan from the NHK. Also, meeting different food, tales and cultures beside the ones from the $RANDOM 24/7 store.
- msephton 3y agoThere's lots to do in Japan, nothing needs to be excluded.