Check Out Akihabara — LIVE AND DIRECT!

The great thing about so many people both in my real live and in cyberspace knowing my interest and love of things Japanese is that they will often provide me with nifty things I might have missed. This time, the guys who moderate the blog comments for me sent me a link they figured I’d love — a webcam looking at a section of Akihabara, Japan — the otaku capital!

As you see here, it is a cool, rainy morning in Japan. ^_^;

Officially, the controller at the top-right directs the camera to several preset positions. Sometimes this works but most of the time, it gets blocked. I sometimes think it is because the request is coming from an American server and not a Japanese one. To get around this, just use number buttons 1-6. That will take it out of “Mode=Motion” to screen refresh every 10 seconds though (“motion” mode displays a frame roughly every second without a complete screen refresh). As you see, one of the views zooms in on the street below, where we see a Japanese man eating breakfast. *lol*

While it wasn’t a great day for screen captures when I wrote this blog entry, I can say that there are days when the streets are just bustling with people. So if you are bored or just like having something different and Japanese displaying on your monitor, the Akihabara webcam just might be the thing for you. ^_^

Oh, I should point out that it seems to work best in IE rather than Firefox, but it will work in Firefox.

Update: I fixed the broken links. Sorry about that. ^_^;

Update 15-July-2015: I don’t think these are working any more, but it may just be busy. It seems most Japanese webcams these days have to go through some live streaming service.