Akihabara: electric town and the old centre
The electronics towers, the shrine on the hill, and the brick arches under the trains. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Chuo-dori
The main run of Electric Town — multi-storey shops stacked floor on floor, the signage doing the talking. Start at the JR Electric Town exit and walk north up the middle. It reads as chaos and is in fact a very orderly trade in components, games and figures.

2. A multi-storey electronics-and-anime tower
Pick one of the big vertical shops and ride it up — basement to roof, retro-games floor somewhere in the middle, the change in clientele on every landing. You don't have to buy anything; the building is the exhibit.

3. Gachapon Kaikan
A corridor of capsule-toy machines, hundreds of them, walls and aisles. Bring 100-yen coins. It's the cheapest souvenir in Tokyo and the most honest read on what Akihabara actually sells.

4. Kanda Myojin
Up the hill west of the tracks — a vermilion shrine founded over a thousand years back, now the half-serious patron of the electronics district. People bring laptops and circuit boards to be blessed here; the *omamori* (luck charms) come shaped for IT safety. The tech-and-tradition crossover, made literal.

5. The Kanda backstreets
Drop back downhill into the older grid south of Ochanomizu — narrow lanes, a few pre-war shopfronts, the *soba* and *anko* shops that predate the electronics. Quiet after the towers, which is the point of routing it last.

6. Manseibashi arches
The red-brick viaduct arches by the Kanda river, a 1912 railway structure now full of small shops and a terrace over the water. End here with a coffee and the trains passing overhead. Ochanomizu station is a short walk on.

Akihabara: electric town and the old centre