Akihabara in 2007

Akihabara at night

Akihabara (秋葉原^?, "Field of Autumn Leaves"), also known as Akihabara Electric Town (秋葉原電気街, Akihabara Denki Gai^?), is a district of Tokyo, Japan. It is located less than five minutes by rail from Tokyo Station. Its name is frequently shortened to Akiba (アキバ^?) in Japan. While there is an official locality named Akibahara, which is also 秋葉原 in kanji, nearby (as part of Taitō-ku), the area known to most people as Akihabara (including the railway station of the same name) also include Soto-Kanda, a part of Chiyoda-ku.^{[citation needed]}

Akihabara is a major shopping area for electronic, computer, anime, and otaku goods, including new and used items. New items are mostly to be found on the main street, Chūōdōri, with many kinds of used items found in the back streets of Soto Kanda 3-chōme. New parts for PC-building are readily available from a variety of stores. Tools, electrical parts, wires, microsized cameras and similar items are found in the cramped passageways of Soto Kanda 1-chōme (near the station). Foreign tourists tend to visit the big name shops like Laox or other speciality shops near the station, though there is more variety and lower prices at locales a little further away. Akihabara gained some fame through being home to one of the first stores devoted to personal robots and robotics.^{[citation needed]}

The area was just out of Sujikai-gomon city gate (present Mansei bridge) which was one of the city gates (Mitsuke) of old Edo (Tokyo). It was the gateway from inner Edo to northern and northwestern Japan and Kan’ei-ji temple in Ueno. Many dealers, craftsmen and relatively lower class samurai lived there.^{[citation needed]}

Timeline[link]

Buildings in Akihabara

Between stores in Akihabara

• 1869: A major blaze destroyed the area. It brought about the decision to clear the 30,000 square metres of land in order to keep future fires from getting into inner Tokyo city.
• 1870: In this cleared land a small Shinto shrine once in old Edo Castle was built. The shrine's name was 鎮火社, which means "the extinguisher shrine"). But many downtown Tokyo residents misunderstood the shrine. They thought that the deity Akiba or Akiha (秋葉) which was the most popular fire-controlling deity in central and eastern Japan must have been enshrined in it. They also called the cleared land "Akiba ga hara" or "Akibappara" which means "the deity Akiba's square".
• 1888: The shrine moved to Matsugaya, near Asakusa.
• 1890: Extension of the rail line (now the Tōhoku Main Line) from Ueno to Akihabara. At first there was no passenger service, for south of the station was the Akihabara cargo docks, where goods from all over the world would flow into Kanda by river and be hauled up the east bank of the canal to be ticketed at the central cargo transport window.
• From the Meiji to the Shōwa period, as the electric railway improved transport to Akihabara and the surrounds, and especially due to the growth in dealerships, the district was designated as Seika Ichiba (青果市場: vegetables and fruits market).
• 1925: Akihabara-Tokyo station connection opened as the Tohoku line extended to Tokyo.
• 1930: The temporary Manseibashi Subway Station opens; it is closed in November 1931.
• 1935: Official establishment of Seika Ichiba. (Kanda Seika Ichiba).
• 1936: The site of Manseibashi Station was closed (later the Transportation Museum—now closed). Railway mania had reached its zenith. The area became the number one place for electrical supplies.
• Circa 1945-1955 After World War II, a black market at Kanda developed around the first school of electrical manufacturing (now the Tokyo Denki University:東京電機大学). Clustered around the Sobu Main line, what began as a host of electrical stores selling vacuum tubes, radio goods and electrical items to the students, has today come to be known as Electric Town. Called "musen" or "wireless" shops, they were the first to begin selling radios. With the advent of wireless and radio goods, people came to be much more connected.
• 1960s: Thanks to advanced technology, the rival Nipponbashi district of Osaka took its position as an equally prominent Electric Town, selling vast volumes of household consumer durable goods such as televisions, refrigerators and washing machines.
• 1980s: Accompanying the spread of the personal computer in family homes ("Famikon"), local shops increasingly began to deal in video games, and major gaming chain stores appeared on the market.
• 1989: Kanda Seika Ichiba moved to Ōta-ku, south district of Tokyo.
• 1990s: With the Yamada and Kojima household chain stores appearing throughout the suburban outskirts of Tokyo, the sale of consumer durables at Akihabara was greatly reduced, but the sale of computer goods increased in equal measure.
• 1991: Sofmap begins its rise as a major seller of new and used Japan-market computer parts and software, including popular systems from NEC (PC-8801 and 9801), Sharp (X68000) and Fujitsu (FM-Towns). Sofmap chain stores begin popping up in different locations in Akihabara.
• 1994: The Windows PC boom and accompanying computer store growth began.
• It was also during the 1990s that the anime craze grew out of video games, and the youth group known as otaku began to pour into Akihabara.
• Since 2000, with name-brand computer sales in decline, anime shops have arisen in their place, selling to the otaku crowd.
• August 25, 2005: Tsukuba Express, Tokyo's fastest private railway, opens in Akihabara.
• Since 2005 Major redevelopment and modernization of the station and surrounding area.
• June 8, 2008: The Akihabara massacre took place on the Sunday-pedestrian-zoned Chūō street. A man killed seven in an attack on a crowd using a truck and a dagger.^[1][2][3]
• January 23, 2011: The pedestrian zone Akihabara's Chūōdōri High Street is reopened 2 1/2 years after the massacre with a memorial service and new rules.^[4]

Police station[link]

Manseibashi Police Station (万世橋警察署, Manseibashi Keisatsusho^?)^[5] is a station of Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. The station takes its name from the nearby bridge, Manseibashi. The area north of the bridge is Akihabara Electric Town".^{[citation needed]}

The station is located slightly east of the Mansei bridge (35°41′50.2″N 139°46′18.5″E / 35.697278°N 139.771806°E / 35.697278; 139.771806), on the Akihabara side of the Kanda River.^[6] In addition to the police station, the building houses other government offices.^{[citation needed]}

The station began as a substation of Kanda Police Station in April 1905. It was disbanded a year later, but re-established in various forms until June 1927, when it was established as the Kanda Manseibashi Police Station. It moved back in with the Kanda station after the station was destroyed in the World War II fire-bombing of Tokyo. In November 1948 the station was re-established under its present name, Manseibashi Police Station.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Tokyo portal

• Ōsu, in Nagoya
• Nipponbashi, in Osaka
• Tourism in Japan
• Akiba-kei

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• JPT Staff, Makoto Nakajima (2008). The Akiba. Japan Publications Trading. ISBN 978-4-88996-249-9

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Akihabara

• Akihabara Official website (English)
• Tokyo/Akihabara travel guide from Wikitravel
• In Tokyo, a Ghetto of Geeks from Washington Post
• Akihabara Geeks (2005) Documentary

Coordinates: 35°41′54″N 139°46′23″E / 35.69836°N 139.77313°E / 35.69836; 139.77313

Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Born	(1946-09-15) September 15, 1946 (age 65)[1] San Saba, Texas, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, director
Years active	1969–present
Spouse	Katherine "Kate" Lardner (1971–78) Kimberlea Cloughley (1981–96; 2 children) Dawn Laurel (2001–present)

Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.

His notable film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, Agent K in Men in Black and its sequels, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain "Two-Face" in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House and rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, Oliver Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter and baseball great Ty Cobb.

Early life[link]

Jones was born in San Saba, Texas.^[2] His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker.^[1] The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry.^[3] He was a resident of Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.

Jones graduated from the St. Mark's School of Texas,^[4] where he attended on scholarship and is now on the board of directors, and attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship. He stayed in Mower B-12 as a freshman, across the hall from future Vice President Al Gore, the son of Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee. As an upperclassman, he was roommates in Dunster House with Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site the Daily Howler. Jones played offensive guard^[5] on Harvard's undefeated 1968 varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game, which featured a memorable and literally last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounts his memory of "the most famous football game in Ivy League history" in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Jones graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1969, and his senior thesis was on "the mechanics of Catholicism" in the works of Flannery O'Connor.^[6][7]

Career[link]

Tommy Lee Jones, August 2006

Jones moved to New York to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969's A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles. In 1970 he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergrad roommates he knew while attending Harvard, Jones and Gore).^[8]

In early 1971, he returned to Broadway in Abe Burrows' Four on a Garden where he shared the stage with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar. Between 1971 and 1975 he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live. He returned to the stage for a 1974 production of Ulysses in Nighttown with Zero Mostel.

In films, he played an escaped convict hunted in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977) and an automobile mogul, co-starring with Laurence Olivier, in the Harold Robbins drama The Betsy.

In 1980, Jones earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn's husband, Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn, in the popular Coal Miner's Daughter. In 1981 he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews.^[9]

In 1983, he received an Emmy^[10] for Best Actor for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in a TV adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. That same year he starred in a pirate adventure, Nate and Hayes, playing the heavily-bearded Captain Bully Hayes.

In 1989, he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger lawman Woodrow F. Call in the acclaimed television mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on the best-seller by Larry McMurtry.

In the 1990s, blockbuster hits such as The Fugitive co-starring Harrison Ford, Batman Forever co-starring Val Kilmer, and Men in Black with Will Smith made Jones one of the best-paid and most in-demand actors in Hollywood. His performance in The Fugitive received broad acclaim and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a sequel. When he accepted his Oscar, his head was shaved for his role in the film Cobb, which he made light of in his speech: "All a man can say at a time like this is 'I am not really bald.'"

Among his other well-known performances during the 1990s were those of the accused conspirator Clay Shaw/Clay Bertrand in the 1991 film JFK (which earned him another Oscar nomination), as a terrorist who hijacks a U.S. Navy battleship in Under Siege and as a maximum-security prison warden who's in way over his head in Natural Born Killers.

Jones co-starred with director Clint Eastwood as astronauts in the 2000 film Space Cowboys, leading a space rescue mission.

In 2005, the first theatrical feature film Jones directed, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was presented at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Jones's character speaks both English and Spanish in the film. His performance won him the Best Actor Award. His first film as a director had been The Good Old Boys in 1995, a made-for-television movie.

Two strong performances in 2007 marked a resurgence in Jones's career, one as a beleaguered father investigating the disappearance of his soldier son in In the Valley of Elah, the other as a Texas sheriff hunting an assassin in the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. For the former, he was nominated for an Academy Award.

Jones has been a spokesperson for Japanese brewing company Suntory since 2006. He can be seen in various Japanese TV commercials of Suntory's Coffee brand Boss as a character called "Alien Jones," an extraterrestrial who takes the form of a human being to check on the world of humans. There are 34 such commercials that can be seen on YouTube.^[11]

In 2010, Jones appeared alongside Ben Affleck in the recession drama, The Company Men. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where early reviews praised Jones's performance as "pitch-perfect."^[12] Jones had a role in the Marvel Studios film, Captain America: The First Avenger.^[13] He also directed, produced and co-starred with Samuel L. Jackson in an adaptation of The Sunset Limited.

Personal life[link]

At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he presented the nominating speech for his college roommate, Al Gore, as the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States.

Jones was married to Kate Lardner, the daughter of Ring Lardner Jr. from 1971 to 1978. He has two children from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, the daughter of Phil Hardberger, former mayor of San Antonio: Austin Leonard (born 1982) and Victoria Kafka (born 1991). On March 19, 2001, he married his third wife, Dawn Laurel.

Jones resides in Terrell Hills, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio and speaks fluent Spanish.^[14] He owns a 3000 acre cattle ranch in San Saba County, Texas^[15] and a ranch near Van Horn, Texas, which served as the set for his film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. He also owns a home and farm in polo mecca Wellington, Florida. Jones is a serious polo player, he has a house in a polo country club in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is an avid San Antonio Spurs fan, he is often seen courtside at Spurs games.

In 2008, Jones signed on with Chesapeake Energy to be a spokesperson for a public relations campaign to promote shale gas (natural gas derived from shale rock through hydraulic fracturing or "fracking") in Texas.

Film and television credits[link]