Chapter 11 - Akihabara / Nakano Broadway
We decided to go back to Akihabara again and use up some of the coins we accumulated over our trip at the game centers. I didn't feel like my wife got a good sense of Akihabara the last time we were here a few day earlier because it was nighttime, raining and super crowded.
We spent a lot of time going from arcade to arcade, we won an Emilia figure, KissShot figure and a Sagiri figure! I probably ended up spending more trying to win the Emilia figure than if I had just bought it from the store, but it's not as fun or rewarding.
Afterwards we decided to check out Nakano Broadway on a whim. I've barely heard about Nakano but it turned out to be amazing! I forgot to take pictures when we went here. From Nakano Station, you head north through a shotengai that's got a lot of ordinary shops from restaurants, to clothing stores. Tons of everyday type of shops. Once you get through the shotengai, you reach Nakano Broadway. It's huge, there 5 floors if I remember correctly. The B1 floor is like a market for the locals. I saw some sketchy looking people down there. The ground floor is more normalish shops. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors have all the otaku goods. In my opinion, Nakano Broadway was a way better experience than Akihabara! The stores didn't have 1' wide aisle and it wasn't jammed packed with people. There's tons of stores that sell new and used goods, including lots of stores that have those display cases. A lot of the figures we saw were much cheaper than the stores in Akihabara and the prices in Nakano vary from store to store. We went to a book stores and even their new books were half price! Nakano Broadway is huge and packed with tons of stores where you can find just about anything. There just aren't any arcades here, but that's okay cause everything's so cheap anyways. We didn't get to explore as much as we wanted to because we had bought a Cocoa, Rize and Chino figures from an anime called Is the Order a Rabbit? and we weren't sure if we had enough room for anything else..
This is going to be a definite stop every time we go to Japan!
We spent a lot of time going from arcade to arcade, we won an Emilia figure, KissShot figure and a Sagiri figure! I probably ended up spending more trying to win the Emilia figure than if I had just bought it from the store, but it's not as fun or rewarding.
Afterwards we decided to check out Nakano Broadway on a whim. I've barely heard about Nakano but it turned out to be amazing! I forgot to take pictures when we went here. From Nakano Station, you head north through a shotengai that's got a lot of ordinary shops from restaurants, to clothing stores. Tons of everyday type of shops. Once you get through the shotengai, you reach Nakano Broadway. It's huge, there 5 floors if I remember correctly. The B1 floor is like a market for the locals. I saw some sketchy looking people down there. The ground floor is more normalish shops. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors have all the otaku goods. In my opinion, Nakano Broadway was a way better experience than Akihabara! The stores didn't have 1' wide aisle and it wasn't jammed packed with people. There's tons of stores that sell new and used goods, including lots of stores that have those display cases. A lot of the figures we saw were much cheaper than the stores in Akihabara and the prices in Nakano vary from store to store. We went to a book stores and even their new books were half price! Nakano Broadway is huge and packed with tons of stores where you can find just about anything. There just aren't any arcades here, but that's okay cause everything's so cheap anyways. We didn't get to explore as much as we wanted to because we had bought a Cocoa, Rize and Chino figures from an anime called Is the Order a Rabbit? and we weren't sure if we had enough room for anything else..
This is going to be a definite stop every time we go to Japan!
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