My Blog of Japan Japan!

Best Place to Buy Keyboards in Tokyo

Here’s the best keyboard shop that I’ve found in Tokyo. It’s in Akihabara, about 5 minutes walk from the station, in a small alley. It’s called Cleverly and there are 3 separate stores. Only one of them does all keyboards, but they’re all close together, so just ask if you land in the wrong one. [...]

List of Bookshops in Tokyo

 
Here’s an excellent list of the major bookshops in Tokyo. It seems to be updated regularly (last update was a few days ago) and includes places that have closed as well as the ones that are still open.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/jp-tokyo.htm

List of Libraries in Tokyo

Here’s a great list of all the libraries in the Tokyo area. It’s all in Kanji, but you can run it through a translator to find the one you need. This is probably going to be my next project for scraping, translating and mapping.

http://www.reference-net.jp/lib_dir/13.html
Here’s a page with links to libraries throughout Japan, organised by prefecture.
Update: [...]

Searching for a Japanese Telephone Number

I got a call from an unknown number on my Keitai but didn’t answer it. It looked like a business number with repeating parts (043-224-1010) and I knew that it was in Chiba by the first 3 digits. Being paranoid, instead of calling it back I went and searched on the internet. It turns out [...]

JR Train Station Maps

Japan Rail has a great page with maps of many major stations. I didn’t like the way they pop out a new page for every one, so I wrote a quick parser to grab all the links. Here’s the pages for individual station maps. Most are in Tokyo, but a few are further away (eg [...]