Japan Travel Guide & Map Tuttle Travel Pack. Wendy Hutton

enthralling and at times dizzying blend of modern and unerringly traditional that is home to 35 million people living in a vast urban sprawl stretching almost unbroken from its center into the neighboring prefectures of Kanagawa, Chiba, Yamanashi and Saitama.

      Shopping in Akihabara

A Day in Northern Tokyo

      Old neighborhoods and the latest gadgets

      Tokyo’s northeast is a fitting place to start exploring the city, as it is here in the neighborhoods of Ueno and Asakusa, and to a slightly lesser extent the electronics and otaku (geek) district of Akihabara, that Tokyo reveals more of its soul than anywhere else.

       Akihabara: Electronics and Otaku

      Electronics took off in Akihabara, two stations northeast of Tokyo Station, with the black market trading of radios and radio components immediately after World War II, and they continue to thrive in the area with a combination of megastores and hundreds of small-scale specialists. Akihabara’s main street, Chuo-dori, and the side streets leading off of it teem with stores, from places like Thanko (thanko.jp), which specializes in quirky electronics such as odd-shaped USB devices and binoculars with built-in video recorders, to Tsukumo Robot Kingdom (robot.tsukumo.co.jp), where you can pick up all sorts of robots and robot parts. Then there are the megastores like Laox, Ishimaru Denki and, best of all, the giant Yodobashi Akiba (yodobashi-akiba.com), which opened on the east side of the station in 2005 and features six floors of home electronics covering everything from the latest cameras to cell phones to computers to even massage chairs.

      Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa