Tokyo With A Twist

The Japanese have perfected the art of obsession. Japan, after all, is the place that gave us otaku, that wonderfully elastic word that refers to people obsessed to distraction with the details of a single thing. The first otaku were Japanese boys obsessed with manga or anime; back in the 1980s and '90s, the term implied a sort of dark geekiness--loners, antisocial kids who retreated to their rooms with their manga and anime, much of it erotic in content.

Otaku are mainstream now. These days there are millions of them, the term applied loosely as a suffix to anyone with a personal obsession. (You can be a Brad Pitt otaku, for example.)

But their spiritual home remains Akihabara, Tokyo's high-wattage neighborhood catering to video games, anime DVDs and other fetishes. It began as a shopping area for teenage boys, and though it is now popular with tourists and women, it is still a magnet for the socially inept male. You don't go to Akihabara to drink, unless it's for a cup of coffee at one of the cafes where you pay for the privilege of having your sugar spooned into your cup by a young Japanese woman dressed as a French maid. This is a place that has much to teach about obsessive behavior--and it's a perfect way to enter Tokyo's otaku currents.

To get a close-up look, I go exploring with Leo Lewis, a journalist for the Times of London whose fascination with Japanese video games, anime and manga began when he was a teenager growing up in Oxford, England, and eventually enticed him to Japan to live. "Akihabara," he says, "is essentially set up to cater to every obsession." Lewis was a contributing writer for Roland Kelts' "Japanamerica," a book describing how Japan's postmodern pop culture has infiltrated the U.S. imagination, but that credential is almost beside the point. A walk through Akihabara with Lewis reveals his sheer joy that such a mecca of obsession even exists.

Akihabara's main street is a canyon of tall buildings where you'll find one of the world's densest concentrations of electronic goods. But Lewis whisks me away from the cacophony of amplified sales pitches and into the back alleys, ushering me past open-front shops devoted to retro Japanese pop culture items, such as miniature collectible characters from long-extinct anime and manga series.