As you may or may not know, I'm currently (late 1998) in Japan on a year-long study program. This program affords me a fair amount of free time, so I can do things like go to Akihabara in search of cheap Famicom games. However, after a little while of searching, I realized that this was like going to Funcoland for all my NES shopping. Although lots of things can be had, some things, especially Disk Systems and certain RPGs I want, go into the far reaches of over 10,000 yen, or way more than I can afford on my student budget. I realized that the streets aren't paved in Japan with rare FC carts (they're actually paved with thousands and thousands of Famicom baseball carts), so it'd be necessary to do what I did in the US - do lots of legwork and rely on the combination of skill and luck that's paid off before. I was going on a 3-day holiday to the cities of Kobe and Kyoto with a couple of friends. I came back with a backpack that was overfilled with stuff, some sore shoulders from having to carry around a (non-working) Disk System everywhere, and some pics. Enjoy my pictoral tour of the modern video-island of Japan!
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