Akihabara has never tidied itself up, and that is the point. In the same few blocks you will find shops selling resistors and connectors by the bagful, shops stacked to the ceiling with second-hand computer parts, and shops devoted entirely to animation, models and games. Anyone who comes for one of these walks past the other as background, and yet the coexistence is the shortest available explanation of how the district came to be what it is. Watch someone going through a junk bin and the posture tells you everything: the hands are serious and the face is not, and this remains true regardless of which kind of shop they happen to be standing in.

The component stalls are often a single counter deep, run by one person who knows where everything is without a system anyone else could follow, and who will find the part faster than you can describe it. The Yamanote line and the subway both reach it. Housing sits out toward the edges near Kanda and Asakusabashi, so once the shutters come down the evening thins out with surprising speed and the street becomes almost quiet. On a weekend afternoon the pavement is difficult to walk at all, and that swing between the two states is part of what living nearby involves.

Nothing here has been curated, and the older electrical stalls have survived underneath the newer trade rather than been replaced by it. Ask what the district sells and you will not have a short answer ready, which is unusual for a place this famous. You will come back anyway, and probably for something you had not planned to look for.