If you say the machines don’t need to be cleaned on the parts people don’t touch then that’s your thing, I guess. If you think it’s OK to laminate a “Watch it! Bagsnatchers!” Sign over the urinal instead of creating an establishment where it doesn’t happen, your call.

But…

That Sega logo does well standing out in this Higashi Shinjuku square. The brand is so clear it’s like this here is the label on the insideout city of Tokyo.

In Akihabara, the arcades don’t have to be polite. On the contrary, it would be the zakkaya or Ginza stationer who would have to apologise to passersby.

Compared to home, Tokyo gets dark early and stays warm late. So night is a playground.

How to be sure you’re in Tokyo

Tokyo fix-all multipurpose commercial realty. Quietly stylish. Slick enough to skirt vogue for a decade; unobtrusive enough to get old and hide.

In the 2020 metropolitan hellscape of 1988’s Akira, the overgrown, decrepit city is an analogue for sick, bulbous, industro-techno-organic mutations.

Akihabara out the back door of Taito Hey. People and electronics and karaoke and videogames and train lines in a pile.

Akihabara is the pristine gamer paradise daydreamt of over Mean Machines in the Mega Drive days.

Sega. I preferred Nintendo and everyone now agrees that Sonic the Hedgehog was a bad game.

Extract from ‘The Two-Bit Player’ by Raymond Chandler (Part 4)

This is a seven-storey-tall billboard showing the teenage-girl-cum-aircraft-carrier stars of an arcade trading card game.