I'm sorry to see any store there go. I used to spend at least a full day walking around Akihabara every time I went to Tokyo for work and always came home with

I'm sorry to see any store there go. I used to spend at least a full day walking around Akihabara every time I went to Tokyo for work and always came home with plenty of stuff I didn't even know I wanted. I still have various "Engineer" brand tools, while not the absolute best they were relatively cheap and well made. I was mainly into building home audio here then and found aluminium cases that were good enough to put next to commercial equipment, a long way from the angular steel stuff I could find online. There were machined knobs, actual ALPS potentiometers, and in the audiophile stores crazy stuff like $1000 binding posts and tantalum resistors with gold-plated leads, nice to look at but I wasn't crazy. What made it great was not the amazing range of stuff or expert advice (language barrier...) but the Japan-ness of it all - maybe tiny, maybe outdated, but everything presented with pride. Of course you can get it all and more online but it isn't the same. Online you don't see lovingly restored TEAC reel-to-reel systems next to Kenwood FM tuners and SGI Indy boxes, all perfectly clean and ready to go. If I was in Tokyo today I'd head right for Akihabara, and maybe buy an extra suitcase to get it all home.