Akihabara Electric Town

This guide to Akihabara Electric Town follows the district's Sunday pedestrian paradise, a tradition going back thirty-five years, and the June 2008 afternoon when a truck and a knife turned that open street violent. It reaches back further too, to the postwar radio black market that gave the neighborhood its Electric Town nickname, and the decades that carried it from appliances to computers to anime. A factory worker named Tomohiro Kato posted a warning online that same morning, before he ever picked up a knife.