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For-foreigners stamp rally begins in Akihabara, gives prizes for walking the otaku neighborhood

Casey Baseel Jul 19, 2024
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Otaku will want to hit all these spots anyway, so why not get a prize while you’re at it?

One of Japan’s favorite promotional events is the stamp rally. Don’t let the “rally” part of the name fool you into thinking they’re as grueling as driving across the Sahara desert or as challenging as four-wheel drifting around gravel roads. Stamp rallies are a fun, laid-back activity in which you visit a series of locations, each with a stamp that you put on a special sheet of paper that you later submit to get a prize. Pretty easy stuff…presuming you know the local language and landmarks well enough to navigate from one stamp spot to another.

That means that most stamp rallies are aimed pretty squarely at Japanese domestic travelers and day-trippers. As of this month, though, Akihabara, Tokyo’s haven of anime and video game culture, is holding a special for-foreigners stamp rally.

Dubbed the Akihabara Travel Stamp Rally, the organizers are billing it as “Akihabara’s first foreign traveler-oriented stamp rally.” Participants’ first stop should be the Akihabara Information Desk, located near the Denkigai-guchi/Electric Town Gate exit of JR Akihabara Station.

▼ Akihabara Information Desk

After getting your sheet, it’s time to get your stamps. Conveniently, the sheet doubles as a map of the neighborhood, and even charts a route that hits all eight stamp spots in the following order.

1. Akiba Tolim (stamp located on 1st floor)
2. Otachu (7th floor)
3. Surugaya (1st floor)
4. Akihabara Radio Kaikan AmiAmi (4th floor)
5. Pasela (1st floor)
6. Akiba Cultures Zone Astop (4th floor)
7. Akiba Cultures Zone At-home Cafe (5th floor)
8. Sofmap (7th floor)

After that, it’s back to the Akihabara Information Desk to receive your prize, which the stamp rally organizers are keeping shrouded in secrecy.

As far as stamp rallies go, though, the Akihabara Travel Stamp Rally looks to be an especially easy one to complete. Unlike some stamp rallies which require you to make the rounds of spread-out train or subway stations, the entire encompassment of the Akihabara Travel Stamp Rally is a handful of city blocks, and they’re all within the area that anyone visiting Akihabara from overseas is going to want to cover, as it’s the densest concentration of otaku-related shops and entertainment venues you’ll find anywhere on the planet. The Radio Kaikan building, in particular, is basically otaku shopping holy ground, the sort of place any fan of Japanese pop culture should visit at least once in their life.

▼ Radio Kaikan (the blurred section is to avoid duplicating the exterior advertising that was present at the time the press release photo was taken, not because there’s billboard-sized porn on display in Tokyo’s otaku district)

And as an added bonus, the back of the stamp rally sheet is an even more detailed map of Akihabara, with a number of other points of interest and travel amenity spots marked.

▼ There’s even a marker, number 13, for the brand-new AmiAmi Akihabara Figure Tower mega-store that’s opening soon.

The Akihabara Travel Stamp Rally is going on now and runs until August 31.

Source, images: PR Times
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s always happy to walk around Akiba.