Take Me Out to Akiba

Picture taken by me. Yes I am a cartoon blimp flying in the sky.

Tokyo's Akihabara district (often shortened to Akiba) is a haven of electronic goods, manga and anime merchandise.Whenever I go to Japan I make it a point to drop by. The experience is almost a pilgrimage of sorts for me. At the very least, it is a trip I look forward to every time I go back to Japan.

Today I'll be talking about media set in and referring to the fabled district. For once, I won't be completely talking about movies as I'll try including TV shows and other types of media.

When one mentions Akiba, the place is nearly synonymous to otaku and otaku culture; surprisingly, although there are anime that feature otaku and otaku culture such as Otaku no Video and Genshiken, very few take place primarily in the district itself. There is the rather forgettable Cyber Team in Akihabara which is not really worth talking about. The rest have short scenes in Akiba here and there, such as this season's Denpa Kyoushi, which is best described as GTO with an otaku teacher.

Tokusatsu, has one up on the anime genre, as Toei has made an (albeit unofficial) installment of their Super Sentai series centered on Akiba. Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger is a series parodying the Tokusatsu genre and many of its tropes. Other than that, the series focuses on that rather than the setting, mostly being a different kind of love letter to the Super Sentai series as compared to Gokaiger, which aired close to Akibaranger's first season.

Man.. this is off to a good start. I am being sarcaaaaaaaastic.

Anyway, thank the great bird for video games, because they released something that I can legitimately talk about!

Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed is a game released for the PS3, the PS Vita and the PS4. It's a sequel to a (AFAIK, Japan-only) PSP game called Akiba's Trip. From the guys who made Way of the Samurai, one of my favorite games of all time, Akiba's Trip (get it?) is a game where you run around Akihabara and strip people of their clothes. That's right. There's a reason for all the indiscriminate stripping, as most of the people you will be stripping are vampires, and removing their clothes will expose them to more sunlight, allowing them to burn under the sun.

The game is structured in the same New Game + play structure where you collect items and complete different story paths every time you go through the game (the game itself can be finished in around ten hours or less). This structure can also be seen in the aforementioned Way of the Samurai, as well as the rather niche PSP game Kenka Bancho, whose game engine is very similar.

What about Akiba, you ask? Akiba's Trip has one of the most accurate depictions of the district in any non-film media, ever. Aside from changes to a few place names (UDX becomes UD+, for example), the layout of the place and the detail is uncanny. Most store facades are as you would see them in Akiba in real life. 

It's decidedly not for everyone, but for fans of the genre it's a treat. I personally enjoyed it both as a fan and in appreciation of the great job they did recreating the setting.

In terms of movie depictions, Akihabara tends to get left by the wayside compared to its more popular and mainstream siblings Shibuya and Shinjuku. That doesn't mean it's completely absent;the district shows up every so often in film featuring otaku and otaku culture. One movie of note is the wildly popular Densha Otoko (Train Man,) which is based on a bunch of posts from the giant image board 2ch. In itself Densha Otoko deserves a whole entry, as it spans a novel, several manga series, and a live action television series in addition to the movie, but we'll leave that story for another day.

Now for something of a somber note. In 2008, a man drove a truck into a crowd in Akihabara, then proceeded to randomly stab a number of people in the vicinity. He was captured, tried and executed, but there were a lot of changes to the way the street opened up on weekends, changes that I felt as far as 2012, when I first visited the district.

There have been two films made about the massacre. One is titled Botchan, which is a loose adaptation and feels more like a black comedy focusing on the perpetrator (little of the film actually takes place in Akiba). The other one, which we will be talking about today, may be the most immersive of all the media we  have talked about today. The movie in question, pictured above, is titled River. The movie is about a woman (Misako Renbutsu) who lost a loved one during the Akihabara incident. She returns to the district and talks to a number of people on how they managed to recover (or not) after the incident.

River was directed by Ryuichi Hiroki, who is probably best known for directing the 2003 adaptation Vibrator. River is a somber, silent contemplation on the effects of tragedy and the process of moving on. By some stroke of fate, one of Japan's most tragic disasters happened during the shooting of this film: the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that claimed thousands of lives. As such, scenes from the devastation, probably only weeks from the actual event, were inserted in the film, in one long take that mirrors the beginning of the film. I can only wonder what Japanese audiences thought when they first saw the scope of the devastation on a personal level.

I've seen the Japanese use film and media to help their collective psyche recover from tragedy - I often think of films like Godzilla and manga like Barefoot Gen as a response to the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent atomic era. As for what happened in 2011, the spate of films coming out afterwards perhaps reflects a need for the collective consciousness to experience the pain as a means of reaching past it.

On to something else then. Until next time.