If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980's, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of , Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn't hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons (blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul), this is no longer true. While it's still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won't bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams.