Published in The Towerlight on January 26, 2009.

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Welcome back from the long break. So as I mentioned in a previous column,I spent a week during my time off in Japan. Yes, it was beautiful. If I had my druthers I would spend this space going on and on about the food. Oh man, the food.

But you came for Tyler Tech, not Tyler Talks Sushi.

Most of my time in Japan was spent in one of the greatest cities in the world, Tokyo. One of the nation’s capital’s many unique neighborhoods is Akihabara, or Akiba for short. Another nickname for the area is “Electric Town” and it’s easy to see why. Visitors to the district, especially after sunset, are treated to a sensory overload. Lights and sounds and people fill the area. Shop employees pass out flyers and shout “Irasshaimase!” (basically, “Welcome, come in, buy our stuff!”) at the top of their lungs, and treat all who enter with bows and smiles.

If you buy a candy bar, they treat you like royalty (or call you “master” if you’re in a maid cafe, but I’m not going to talk about maid cafes, so Google them). Much of the neighborhood is dominated by four tech dealer juggernauts:

Laox, Akky, Sofmap and Yodobashi Camera. The first three have several pretty big outposts spread around the streets while Yodobashi has an impossibly massive building all to itself right outside the train station. It even has its own theme song that sounds like a jazzy version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but that’s another story.

A lot of these places call themselves camera stores, but that’s a misnomer. At Yodobashi, for example, they have sporting goods, bicycles, action figures, video games… it’s like a Best Buy inside a Wal- Mart. Wandering all these places was great. A friend and I saw obscenely low prices on headphones, global phones that worked everywhere but Japan, games that will never come to the States (“The Idol M@ster,” I’m looking at you) and the crane games from hell.

Really, I got addicted to those things, trying to get this toy I spotted for myself and a certain

Towerlight editor (the other nerd). The prizes even have hooks on them, making it look far easier

than it is.

I spent more than $25 at that arcade and all I have to show for it is a little “Nico Nico Douga” plushie. Fortunately, within a few days, I went cold turkey.

One of the things that makes Akihabara unique for foreign shoppers is duty-free shopping. Usually a pleasure afforded only to airport wanderers on their way out of the country, many stores in Akiba will take out the 5% consumption tax for anybody who racks up more than 10,000 yen ($110) in sales and has been in the country for less than six months.

Excellent, right? Kind of.

I got the sense that a lot of these prices are jacked up to fool foreigners. And with the exchange rate as poor as it is, I got the sense that not many people were biting. Next time, however, I fully hope to be able to splurge on that camera and that pair of headphones with no regrets.

For more of my escapades in Japan, check my video diaries at www.youtube.com/aresef.

Next time: What the heck happened at the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld over the winter? Meanwhile, his Apple-y highness Steve Jobs has stepped back from day to day duties as the iconic firm’s figurehead for health reasons. But the rumors of Circuit City’s death are not as greatly exaggerated as we thought, as the nation’s second largest electronics store announced this month that it’s going out of business.

Is the sky falling? I don’t think so, but more about that next week.