Friday, February 18, 2011

I-Cafe (Net Cafe in Akihabara)

You may think I come to Akihabara so often. But honestly, it's sometimes my friend that is into Akihabara, and I often end up having nothing to do in this area. Of course, there are so many kinds of manga shop everywhere in Akihabara, but I'm more into anime than manga, so this time I decided to spend some time at this Internet cafe "I-Cafe". 

I had been expecting to see a state-of-the-art computer as Akihabara is known as a place where any electronic device is available, but as you can see the display seemed to be 10 years old. And the box seat was so small that I inadvertently hit the chair against the wall again and again.


Do you know Internet cafes in Japan were considered places where homeless people spend overnight? Those people were called "Net cafe refugees". But the association that consists of net cafes in Japan argued against it saying "We never call our customers 'refugees'." You can take a shower here and have those instant foods as well. 


 You can play video games as well. I don't know much about video games, but when I saw some playing games, they seemed all very new. And these are the original manga of those video games.


There are some Internet cafes in my city as well, but there is nothing like this picture there. You can have any amount of ice cream free of charge here, but I didn't feel like having some.  


 Do you know how "Moe" is written in Kanji? The wrong word (in this case)  "Moe" was slashed and corrected with "Combustible" beside it. "Moe" has the latter meaning too. 

The whole atmosphere was relaxing and I liked it. But you can't expect something very unique here even though this cafe is in Akihabara.