Geek-hunting turning Akihabara into dangerous place

“I was waiting for a friend at the Electric Town entrance at Akihabara Station,” Shukan Gendai (March 29) hears from a 27-year-old woman. “Suddenly an otaku-type guy with a bandana around his head comes up to me: ‘Come on, let’s go.’ I didn’t know him; I just gaped at him. He starts shouting, ‘You do it for money, you do it for money! I’m calling the police!’ He’s got his cell phone out. I’m running, he’s chasing me... I made a dash for the station office, and got there not a moment too soon. It was a long time before I could stop shaking.”

Akihabara used to be primarily what the name “Electric Town” suggests -- a district teeming with electrical appliance discount shops. In the 1990s, the otaku moved in – “geeks” with what seems to outsiders an unhealthy dedication to things like computer games and manga. The worst you could have said about the area then, and for years afterwards, was that it was weird. Now, reports Shukan Gendai, it’s “scary.” Crime, it says, stalks the streets of “Akiba.”

Extortion, of the kind known locally as “otaku-hunting,” is the main danger. Nowhere in Tokyo, say the magazine’s police sources, are you more at risk of a shakedown. One neighborhood distinction begets another: as otaku arm themselves for self-protection, Akihabara has become second in Tokyo only to Kabukicho as a venue for weapons-related offenses.

“You can’t walk around Akiba unarmed,” Shukan Gendai hears from a man in his 40s discreetly photographing passing young girls dressed, Akihabara-style, as French maids or Japanese comic book characters. The man’s “weapon” is a dummy saber in a hip sheath. It looks frighteningly like the real thing. “If a gang of otaku-hunters comes after me,” he says, drawing it with a flourish, “I’ll flash them a glimpse of this!”

Numerous incidents over the past few years suggest his fears are not groundless. In 2006, on the day Playstation 3 went on sale, three high school boys from Chiba Prefecture beat and robbed a college student in a public rest room, getting away with 50,000 yen and leaving the victim seriously injured. Last August, a third-year law student was set upon by a tattooed tough – “you bumped my younger sister” -- and forced to surrender his cash.

The spread of this kind of incident has been a shot in the arm for weapons dealers. The ones in Akihabara apparently don’t insist on too rigorous an ID check. Shukan Gendai witnesses a transaction: a man in his 20s purchasing, after examining an array of stun guns and army knives, a 30-cm wooden dagger – “as a decoration,” he says.

Whether a weapon is defensive or offensive depends on the hand that wields it. In September 2005, a group of otaku in full manga attire was hanging out at an Akiba computer shop. Suddenly the mood turned sour, and an 18-year-old boy stabbed a 38-year-old man with a butterfly knife. Police arrived to find “a sea of blood.” That’s what happens when you lose the distinction between yourself and the cartoon character you're dressed up as.

A variation on the otaku-hunting theme is “maid-hunting.” In 2006, an 18-year-old girl working part-time at a “maid café” was forced at knifepoint to submit to some feverish groping in a stairwell. Even if she’s not a “maid,” a woman walking alone may be subject to catcalls, if not worse.

“Something unpleasant happens every day,” says a 24-year-old OL whose office is in Akihabara. “Just yesterday, a guy in a Doraemon cartoon cat outfit called out to me, ‘Where are you going? How much do you charge?’”

© Japan Today