Welcome to Akihabara Renditions

Akihabara Renditions's mission statement is to service the North American Anime Community with Merket Analysis, Region 1 Market Coverage, technology, both new and old, and to form a nostolgic historia of Japanese animation's history in the United States.

However, there is a long story between how I got to the name Akihbara Renditions. It started under another name, Little Akihabara. When I was in high school, some friends of mine in the anime club I ran decided that we wanted to run our own fanzine. All sorts of names came about for it, Anime-this, Anime-that ... until it dawned on me.

Akihabara is a suburb north of Tokyo also known as 'Electric Town'. During the economic boom of the 1970s and prosperity of the 1980s and 90s, Akihabara became the Mecca for anime and video gaming fans because of the sheer number of home electronics dealers who had literally everything. I had adopted the name of that city for a cluster or two of computer components stores I frequented; much like the Vietnamese community can be called Little Saigon or Little Hanoi, or regions of New York City and Chicago were once called Little Italy; I adopted Little Akihabara for this area.

I suggested the name for our fanzine and it took, despite the hard pronunciation. However, LA was doomed to become a failed project (or so I thought). As time constraints grew, as well as preparing for University, we never had the time to come across getting webspace and learning the coding it would take to run a good looking fan magazine. It was a project that was worked on every few weeks but never something that left planning and went into production.

However, here on Blogspot, I had toyed with names and such and never liked either of them. The first was Anime-Rant; I'll admit, I was angry when I first thought about it and created it. But I noticed that many of my posts were not really rantish, so I decided on the first change. The Blog then changed names to Pro-Otaku, an attempt at a news/review site not only from that of a fan but from a fan who had devoted much life and time to anime, but was not as such anymore. So, I've decided to take aspects of both parts and combine them into Little Akihabara here.

(The previous was written on 2005 August 27; the following is from 2006 June 27)

Though as I declared in this post that I had yet again changed the name of this Blog. I should have looked around more and did the research, because apparently, there had already been a Little Akihabara on the Internet.

Out of curiosity, I decided to search the web for Little Akihabara one day while on a break at work - just to see where I ended up on the lists. Well, the good news is this: I (littleakihabara.blogspot.com) came up ranked number 5 on Google (though, my link in a forum signature came up number 3) and came up number 1 on Yahoo!

But being number 5 on Google, I looked at the number one spot and saw the exact name. I clicked the link and discovered this was the name of a UK Fansub group. I politely contacted the leader of the group and inquired about their status; the page hadn't been updated in a few years and I thought maybe the group had gone defunct. I received a response back a few days later. The group has been in and out of activity using the name for nearly a decade. Seeing as how their usage of the name dates back about as far as my own serious fandom, I didn't feel it right to stake a claim just because I was a little more active than the other. I've recently confirmed with the true Little Akihabara is under major construction and going to be making a come back real soon. I really want to extend my thanks to Barry for making both this transition of Little Akihabara to Akihabara Renditions and the revitalization of the old Little Akihabara a smooth and friendly process.

Why the name Akihabara Renditions? Well, the Akihabara is there for the same reasons as it was there before; Renditions because the majority of the commentary here is based on interpretations and translations of the actual news of the day. Plus, this is also a bit of a homage to the old US Renditions company which was a major player in the current Region 1 market back in the early 1990s.

So, where do we go from here? Well, I'm not going to just pick up from where I left off. I have actually gone back and edit all of the intermittent mentioning of my former-Little Akihabara and change them to Akihabara Renditions.