April 08, 2004
#62 :: Folding Loupe
The Akihabara, in Tokyo, teems with geeks. More electronics shops, game boutiques, appliance megamalls and circuitboard salvage yards are crammed into a few square kilometres there that probably anywhere on the planet. You can build a mainframe from components, buy top-of-the-line synthesizers costing millions of yen, feed your fetish for porno video games or indulge your love of heavy little objects to the Nth degree. Shoppers flow through stalls and alleys, pausing to squint at spec sheets and microchips, to fondle controllers and machine interfaces, giving it the air of a hive into which someone has pumped a calming smoke. It's the place William Gibson probably visited while dreaming up the Sprawl in the seminal Neuromancer. Two shopkeepers there took such an interest in my bulky Pentax 6x7 camera that I felt guilty about walking out empty handed, and scored this little metal loupe - a folding magnifier for viewing slides and negatives - something I actually needed at the time. I've had it for 12 years now, and the folding mechanism is still tight, the glass still clear.