Akihabara is usually sold as a spectacle of strangeness. It's more interesting read straight: a dense, orderly trade in electronics and the things electronics fans love, sitting next to one of the city's older religious and railway corners. This walk does the towers, then climbs out of them.
Start at the Electric Town exit and walk north up Chuo-dori, the signage doing all the talking. Ride one of the big vertical shops top to bottom — the retro-games floor, the figures, the components — then the Gachapon Kaikan, a corridor of capsule machines that tells you more about the place than any guidebook. Bring 100-yen coins.
Then climb west to Kanda Myojin, the vermilion shrine that has appointed itself patron of the district: people bring hardware to be blessed, and the luck charms are shaped for IT safety. From there, drop into the older Kanda backstreets — soba shops, pre-war fronts, the quiet you'd forgotten the area had. End at the 1912 Manseibashi arches on the Kanda river, brick viaducts turned into small shops and a terrace, with the trains running overhead and Ochanomizu a short walk on.
