Summer Trip: Akihabara

Akiba is the mecca of anime and game otaku, but I only spent a couple of hours there since most of the old school stuff I was interested in was more readily available in Nakano. There are floors and floors of stuff that can be found in the buildings along Chuo-Dori.

Displays of anime goods are found lining the streets.

In truth, I could have spent weeks exploring Akiba, but I just had to bite the bullet and keep on moving.

Anyway, I stopped by Miniature Park and Leonardo to take a look at what they had to offer.

Miniature Park is a small cramped shop filled with military figures of all sort. Unfortunately, they did not have much in the way of 1/72 (or 20mm) figures. Most of the items are imports that are readily available elsewhere for comparable prices. I was hoping to pick up a Han command pack from 3D Model Studio, but apparently they seemed to have no knowledge of the manufacturer despite being listed as a distributor of the figures. I ended up buying a couple of Hinchliffe 20mm figures from a plastic jar of loose 1/72 figures for ¥100 each because I needed change for the subway.

Not to far away from Miniature Park is Leonardo (レオナルド). There are four storeys of models, and a basement level of backissue magazines.

I started browsing from the top down.

4th Floor

3rd Floor

2nd Floor

Basement
There are a lot of old OOP kits in Leonardo, but expect to pay collector's prices for them. Old 1/72 ESCI kits were in abundance, but cost about US$20 each. There was even an old AMT Civil War Balloon kit for about US$75.

I wanted to buy a backissue of Model Graphix that I had been hunting for, but they said that they did not accept my VISA card.

More information on these hobby shops and others in Tokyo can be found at AFV Modeller's Extremely Prejudiced Guide to Tokyo Hobby Shops.