Tokyo Realtime Audio Guides: Your Personal Tours of Akihabara and Kabuki-cho

By Manuel Gere

Getting to know Tokyo's most interesting wards is one of the great pleasures of living in Japan, though it can be a haphazard process that takes years of trial, error, more error and disorientation (not to mention stacks of ichi-man-en bills).

Enter Tokyo Realtime Audio Guided Walking Tours, an ingenious new series of products designed to introduce you to areas of the capital - beginning with Akihabara and Kabuki-cho - by means of the spoken word and simple English-language maps.

Each of these packages contains a glossy photo booklet of its area, a map of Tokyo Realtime's suggested tour route, and a CD containing an hour-long MP3 audio guide to pretty much everything of note as you follow the directions you hear in your headphones.

The Akihabara journey is relatively concise yet it's packed with detailed history and anecdotes, which help to bring the area to life without overwhelming you with unnecessary information. The narrator is Patrick W. Galbraith, author of The Otaku Encyclopedia and internationally famous Akiba tour guide (you can often find him cosplaying as Goku from Dragon Ball Z), who speaks clearly and entertainingly on all sorts of subjects - from maids and manga and to electronics and games.

Meanwhile in Kabuki-cho your tour guide will direct you to the area's most colorful destinations, including a remarkably seedy venue called "Sky Heart" - a plane-themed sex shop where patrons can have their way with employees who are dressed as flight attendants. As with Akihabara, there's a lot more to Kabuki-cho than people initially suspect, and the narrator does an excellent job of unraveling its secrets and debunking certain myths.

As for the Tokyo Realtime concept itself, it's surprisingly easy to get to grips with. Just transfer the MP3 file to your iPhone/iPod/whatever and take the small map included to the tour's starting point (the Electric Town exit of JR Akihabara Station, or the gates of Yasukuni-dori in Kabuki-cho), then press PLAY and begin walking. Of course you'll want to press PAUSE every time you stop to look at things in closer detail, but the user-friendly pacing and clarity of the narration means you'll rarely, if ever, need to skip back through the recording.

With plenty of surprises even for those of us who are already based in Japan, and even more useful information for those who are just visiting, Realtime Tokyo is a clever concept done extremely well. At just $12 each, these guides are also excellent value for money. Click here to snap them up!

To download a PDF of this story as it appears in the magazine, click here

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