I haven’t been to too many big cities – Boston, Chicago, and LA are really the only urban areas I visited before coming to Tokyo. So needless to say, I was blown away by the scale of Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district. Some of the stores are unbelievable gigantic, like the eight-story Sega arcade and Taito Game Station.

[Taito Game Station]

Alongside these technological meccas, tiny stores smaller than mall kiosks sold items like mobile phone decorations. Some of the small stores probably had a stock of 5,000 items all crammed in to a small, cube-shaped area.

[Smaller stores]

In Japan, personal space is a precious commodity. With an extremely large population and just a few small island of space, the natural tendency would be to make buildings as tall as possible as to provide the most space. However, Japan is prone to frequent earthquakes (which is what formed the islands in the first place) so tall buildings are unsafe.

Therefore, the tendency is to make buildings, rooms, and stores as dense as possible. This gives rise to places like Akihabara, where the synnergy of many stores selling similar products actually boosts everyone’s sales by bringing more people to the area.