Leibson's Law

I’ve been attending the Japan Microprocessor Forum in Tokyo this week. Friday was the day between the end of the Forum and my flight, so I set off to the Akihabara, Tokyo’s Electric Town, to see if any of it remained. The Akihabara developed after World War II as a place to find surplus radio/electronic parts. It evolveded into a rabbit warren of little shops built under the JR Line’s elevated railway tracks. Last time I was in Tokyo, I failed to find any remains of the old Akihabara. This time, my electro-archeology work uncovered some really interesting remnants of the old Akihabara.

However, what I found immediately upon surfacing at the Akihabara Metro stop was not the old Akihabara but the new one, which the local youth now abbreviate to “Akiba.” Nothing connotes the new Akiba like the new Yodobashi Camera-Akiba store with nine floors of consumer electronics, cameras, photo accessories, camcorders, binoculars and telescopes, mobile phones, and appliances. Yodobashi’s Akiba store certainly puts Fry’s in the US on notice.

(Note: While I’m here in Japan, one item in the news is the objection in China regarding the exploitation of one of China’s national symbols, the panda, for commercial gain in this year’s animated film Kung Fu Panda. I couldn’t help but note while strolling around Yodobashi Camera that the store uses The Battle Hymn of the Republic—a song from the Civil War era that’s very near and dear to many in the US—for the tune in its jingle. You can hear Yodobashi’s jungle here if you watch to the end of the video. This stuff just happens.)

Back to Akihabara. Exiting Yodobashi Camera (where I’d gotten some blissful relief from Tokyo’s high heat and humidity), I walked through the JR Railway station and found the old Akihabara. It’s still there. The first store I stumbled upon had half-century-old wooden counters with all manner of electronic parts from the 1970s and earlier.

Then I turned the corner and ran into the old rabbit warrens containing many dozens of small stalls, each selling capacitors, resistors, switches, knobs, etc. in addition to mobile phones, new and old computers, computer parts, and everything else electronic.

A very few of the Akihabara stalls specialized in tubes! It looks like the high-end audiophile tube craze certainly extends to Japan.

I spent a couple of hours wandering these small shops and wondering who would ever buy some of these moldering old components and just how long these small anachronisms would withstand the constant pressure to modernize from the likes of Yodobashi.