Which is all you really wanted, anyway.

Shortly after I regaled readers with a tale of of the narcoleptic breakfast treat created by the supergeniuses running McDonald’s Japan and hinted at more reports to come, my excursion in the Orient was derailed by a minor crisis that forced one of my traveling companions to head home early. Suffice it to say that reservations were canceled, hands were wrung, zigs were taken in lieu of zags, and so on.

The trip became something of a mess, but before flying back yesterday, I did manage to make a quick, obligatory pilgrimage to Akihabara, Tokyo’s exalted gadget mecca. Below, a photo essay as GONY eases its way back to regular programming (read: as I sleep off the return-leg bout of jet lag).

There are three parts to Akihabara, roughly speaking: a flea-market building near the station, the squeaky clean main street Chuo-dori, and the spotty patches of pachinko parlors and specialty used shops in the alleys off Chuo-dori. None of this is in the actual neighborhood named Akihabara—“Akihabara” the shopping district is actually in Kanda, but nobody seems to care about the distinction, just like nobody complains that present-day Madison Square Garden is nowhere near Madison Square.

Exit the Akihabara “Electric Town” station—located on the JR Yamanote line, a rail loop that connects most of Tokyo’s major neighborhoods—and you see this complex whose neon name translates as “The World’s Radio Hall.” So right away, you know you’re dealing with some cutting-edge tech. I mean, radios!

Inside The World’s Radio Hall are cramped corridors of stalls selling electronic devices and parts, striking not just in the sheer quantity of wares on offer but in the meticulous organization of every square inch. It wasn’t enough for this storekeep to create a hand-lettered sign for every part on display; he felt compelled to color-code.

It’s often said that in Akihabara, you can find parts that you couldn’t get anywhere else, which is true to a limited extent, but the greater appeal to me is the presentation. Inspiration emanates from the tidy parade of diodes, capacitors, etc., inviting you to pick up a dish and build something. You probably can get 99.9% of this stuff elsewhere, but not the experience.

The Akihabara stalls are quite agile—thanks to their small size, they can transform themselves en masse in response to market trends more quickly than the monolithic electronics chains. Every time I visit, it seems a different class of product dominates the “Radio Hall.” Five years ago, it was pocket translators. Two years ago, it was in-car GPS displays.

This year, it’s a spy-camera boom. Mini cameras of this sort aren’t new, but the advent of tiny high-res LCDs appears to have provided a tipping point. I easily saw five to ten times as many of these cameras for sale as I did last April. Perhaps you could draw some misguided sociological assumptions from the trend, but I’m not going there…OK, fine, all Japanese people are creepy paranoid upskirt voyeurs. Happy now?

Also under the Radio Hall awning is the Kotobukiya character shop, one of Tokyo’s best sources for cute anime toys (more My Neighbor Totoro than Dragonball Z) and “blind boxes.” In the foreground you can see a machine that produces customized Hello Kitty name stickers. These are used in lieu of government I.D. in Japan.

Also visible outside Kotobukiya, and all around Akihabara, are the “Capsule Stations,” better known as the gacha gacha for the sound their cranks make when you turn them to get a toy. These coin-op stations, whose prizes are worlds better than the junk you might see in similar American machines, are a local fixture but are slowly disappearing from Japan in general. Gacha gacha used to be almost ubiquitous, but it’s rare that you see a large cluster of them outside a nerd-focused neighborhood like Akihabara anymore. This wall of gacha gacha offered a wide variety of toys, ranging from giant robot figurines to slightly more expensive giant robot figurines.

The skyline on Chuo-dori, the neighborhood’s focal avenue, is predictably dominated by electronics chain stores. Laox and Sofmap each have more than half a dozen locations in Akihabara alone. Ishimaru Denki, seen to the left of Laox above, is unusual for the area in that it doesn’t cater to tourists with English-language signs or duty-free outlets. Don’t feel threatened, though: Like all store staff in Japan, the Ishimaru salesmen will still attempt to converse with you in panicked, broken English, even if you speak to them in fluent Japanese. It’s a charming idiosyncrasy of Japanese culture that never gets annoying at all!!!!!!!

Across the street from Ishimaru Denki is this Sega arcade, one of many towering game centers in the area. Like the gacha gacha, arcades are fading from the Japanese landscape outside of Akihabara, unable to hold on any longer against the appeal of home console and online gaming. In Akihabara, every arcade’s floor plan hews to a de facto standard that places community games at the top, general video games in the middle, and eye-grabbing “UFO catchers” (i.e., crane games) on the ground floor.

UFO catcher prowess is a point of pride among Japanophiles, myself included. The key is to view the crane as a tool of manipulation rather than acquisition. If you try to use the pathetically weak claws to pick something up directly, you won’t have much success. Instead, you have to use the crane to nudge your desired item toward the prize chute.

The item placement in Akihabara UFO Catchers tends to be pretty unfair. The picture above was taken at a Sega arcade in Nagoya, where the machines were more forgiving. I realize that I’m beginning to sound like the chain-smoking grandmother who claims to know which casinos have the “loosest” slots, so it might be time to swear off my UFO Catcher addiction.

This parting shot nicely encapsulates Akihabara. On the right is the area’s main Sofmap (née Bic Camera) location, in the middle is the renovated Taito Game Station arcade, and to the left of Taito is Toranoana, the best manga shop in Tokyo aside from Mandarake. And on the Sofmap building, a manga ad featuring girls with comically large breasts. Viva Akihabara!

Earlier in the decade, Akihabara was unkempt and a touch seedy, mirroring the otaku clientele it served. As the area has become more of a prized tourist destination, it has cleaned up its act, but unlike, say, the post-Giuliani Times Square, Akihabara has managed to maintain some of its mythical character. The maid cafes and schoolgirl-panty vending machines may be less prevalent than before, but I still know of no better place to go when you want to feel like a big dork—and see some even bigger ones.