Visit Japan’s otaku mecca, and stage giant monster fights in it, without ever leaving the comfort of your living room.
Between the coronavirus outbreak and the postponement of the Olympics, a lot of trips to Tokyo have been cancelled. We know, it stinks, especially if traveling to Japan has been a lifelong dream of yours, and we really were looking forward to seeing you all. In a health climate where a trip to the movie theater is too risky, though, a trip overseas is pretty much out of the question.
But hey, if you can’t get yourself to Tokyo, you can at least take heart knowing there’s a way to bring Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood to you.
Granted, there’s some assembly required, as this scale model of the otaku culture mecca is an extremely thorough papercraft kit from local company Niku no Mansei, whose presence in Akihabara predates modern anime or video games. Niku no Mansei is actually a butcher shop/restaurant complex, but the company also has a wide variety of papercrafts kits available for free, on its Mansei Club hobby and activities website.
Many of the kits are for simpler things like trucks or trains, but you can also recreate several blocks worth of the Akihabara cityscape. Many major landmarks are included, though with slightly modified names (for example, the Radio Kaikan otaku specialty complex becomes “Television Kaikan,” electronics store Labi turns into “Tabi,” and Sega’s two Akihabara arcades are now owned by “Saga”).
Once you’ve got everything set up, you could sit back and gaze appreciatively at the skyline…but let’s be honest here. If you’re putting together a model of Akihabara, it’s an absolute certainty that you own multiple anime robot, tokusatsu, or kaiju figures, and you now have an authentic arena for them to fight in!
▼ And if you’re in the privacy of your own home, you won’t even have to pixelize Ultraman, Zetton, and Alien Baltan for copyright reasons.
The Akihabara papercraft set can be found online here, with a special page just for the model of the Niku no Mansei building here, extra streets here, and assembly diagrams here. Honestly, a butcher shop is the last place we’d have expected to find these, but just like with its hidden cutlet sandwich vending machines, Niku no Mansei is full of surprises.
Source: Niku no Mansei via Kai-You
Top image: Niku no Mansei
Insert images: Niku no Mansei (1, 2, 3)
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