Two years ago ('99), as a graduation celebration I went on a little tour of the Orient with a few friends. Being an obsessed arcade collector at the time (nothing's changed :) I was naturally anxious to visit the shops I'd heard so much about in Tokyo where great arcade games, ancient and modern, were reportedly stacked high and sold cheap.The trip didn't disappoint - I arrived back in London with a suitcase stuffed with game boards, overspilling into a huge paper bag of carry-on-luggage. My friends generously helped out, cramming boards and cartridges into what little space they had left in their own bags. Oh, and the rest of the trip round the Orient was good too, but anyway... :)I wrote a little report on this site when I got back and judging from emails it did seem to garner some interest. So... here's the update.In June 2001 I was given the opportunity of a five-month secondment in Tokyo. Naturally in my free time I was keen to revisit the shops I'd been to two years ago, and explore the scene a little further. What was initially disappointing was that the prices of boards had gone up considerably since I visited last. It's to be expected I guess as the rare stuff gets all the more hard to find. Kerrazy prices like the Y4000 Galaga I picked up last time (170 Yen to the pound) are most definitely a thing of the past, never to return. But nonetheless, depending on your tastes, there are still bargains to be had. Almost certainly not enough to make it worthwhile flying over just for the sake of an arcade shopping spree, but if you happen to be in town you could do much worse than check these shops out.
Where to go...
Only in the Akihabara district of Tokyo could such an obscure hobby as arcade board collecting be sufficiently mainstream for a handful of shops to open up to supply the local demand. Akihabara is the electronic goods shopping area of Tokyo. Where street traders will sell you anything from an ancient gramophone to a Sun server (no, really) and component markets could make you never want to use an RS or Maplin catalog again.To the best of my knowledge there are four arcade shops in Akihabara. There may be more, it's very tricky to know. If it weren't for Try's recent relocation, there's absolutely no chance that you'd happen in to one of these shops accidentally, and even if you know where to look they're not easy to find. Two years ago I got the tip-off that the shops I was looking for advertise in a magazine called 'Gamest', which unfortunately is now out of print.
[I'll put a map up here when I get round to drawing it...]
Shops
Try Having relocated to the ground floor of the same building, Try is perhaps the only arcade shop which the unprepared traveller might happen into by chance. (The way that every last square inch of window space is covered in poster adverts for games kinda helps).
Mak! Japan Located in the fifth floor of a building situated just up the street from Try (and actually on the main Akihabara high street, though you have to go down the side-street to get to the entrance). Unlike all the other shops, most of the merchandise is not locked in glass display cabinets or behind the counter; this is particularly useful to the illiterate foreign arcade shopper who can pull out the bubble-wrapped boards from the shelves and glance at the bundled instruction cards/manual photocopies to figure out what the games are.Funtom Hidden away in a far corner of Akihabara, Funtom is not the easiest of places to find. Correspondingly the shop's character is closer to an indoor-market stall than the more plush environments of Try or Mak. The reward for trekking out this far is a wide selection of games and generally more favourable prices.G-Front Located on the fourth floor of a building on the main road of Akihabara, just past Citibank, G-Front is perhaps best described as being a cross between Mak and Funtom. Unlike the other shops, I found G-Front don't make a habit of showing the games working when selling them, though they're happy to test them in front of you if asked. As well as selling boards and cartridges, G-Front also have a good selection of arcade posters and decals, and usually have a good selection of other arcade-related odds and sods.Throughout the shops, games are nearly always sold with copies (if not the originals) of their instruction sheets and pinout tables. JAMMA harnesses for the older games are virtually never included; but can usually be bought seperately for around Y3000.One intensely frustrating fact about Japan in general (the arcade shops of Akihabara included) is the lack of credit card acceptance. Going into a shop or restaurant and expecting to pay by plastic is asking for trouble. The local custom, strange though it may seem, is to waddle around with your pockets stuffed with cash and to bleed an ATM dry when you need more. But it gets worse... Japanese credit cards use a different system to the rest of the world (with a much thinner magnetic stripe on the back). So even establishments and machines that claim to accept Visa cards can turn you down. To my knowledge, only Citibank* cash machines (open 24 hours) will grant cash advances from Western bank cards. The one in Akihabara main street is marked on the above map. Sales tax of 5% (at time of writing) is added on to the advertised price for all items sold.At the time of writing, Funtom won't accept plastic; Try will allow only one item to be paid for by plastic. Mak's policy is similar but less consistent to Try's, and G-Front *seem* to allow anything to be paid for by card.(* FWIW, there's no 'si' sound in the Japanese alphabet; the closest phoneme is pronounced 'shi', which doesn't flatter Citibank much.)
Language
Getting by in the arcade shops (as indeed pretty much any shop in Japan) is possible without being able to speak the language. The shop staff have a very limited knowledge of English, but are polite and friendly and try their best to help; though I'd recommend not trying to ask technical questions as it'll be mutually frustrating and you'll wind up nowhere.But unlike other shops, if you can't read the Japanese characters you'll be helpless. It may seem strange, given that that almost all of the game names are in English, that the pricelists and display items are universally in Japanese. But given how esoteric and inconsistent English spelling can be, I guess settling on a local alphabet for stock listing makes it easier to search and sort.Katakana is the Japanese phonetic alphabet used mainly to represent foreign words. The good news is that it comprises only 46 characters and can be learned in an hour or so. It might take a bit of imagination to see how, say, 'Baachiyafuaitaa' can translate to 'Virtua Fighter', or 'Naitsuobuzaraundo' can be 'Knights of the Round' (spaces would help, wouldn't they?). But perseverence is the key. Learn it here!
Component Markets
[I'll write this up eventually. With pictures too...]
