Over the past few years, Japanese animation and mangas have been more and more popular in western countries. It is also true that if the number of tourists coming to Japan has increased so much, it is because more and more people are coming mainly to buy Japanese animation and manga related merchandise or tour specialized stores.
The place in Tokyo that represents the most this part of japanese culture is Akihabara which contentrates an impressive number of otaku related stores.
Akihabara used to be the electric town, the number one spot to buy electronic and computer-related items. While you can still find a good number of them, the stores selling manga, and mangashi and other otaku-related goods have now significantly outnumbered them.
The most popular ones are Tora no Ana, Gamers and Animate. Most of those stores have up to around 7 floors packed with all kind of goodies. You will find mangas, mangashi (magazines featuring the latest mangas. They are published regularly, on monthly or weekly schedules), video games, anime soundtracks and dojinshis (manga drawn by amateurs that feature professional manga's characters for the most part ). I invite you to google those stores for more information.
You will find stores that sell anime figures such as the chain called "liberty"(there are several of them) or trading cards such as "yellow submarine".You will also come across some shops selling train models that caters to what we call in Japan Tetsu-ota (abbreviation of Tetsudo-otaku, people passionate by trains).
In those cafes, waitresses dressed in maid costumes act as servants, and treat customers as masters (and mistresses) in a private home, rather than as cafe customers.
Some of them also organize lives performed by maids.
In Akihabara, there is also a club that plays only anime and video games' songs : Club Mogra.
Have a lot of fun in Akihabara !
Benji
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