Fire in Akihabara (8-floor Yamagiwa Soft building burns)

Just saw this over at mmcafe's bbs: the main Yamagiwa Soft building in Akihabara's "Electric Town" shopping district burned yesterday. Here's a photo of what the building looked like before the fire. If you look at this map of the area, it'll give you an idea of the relative location of the building. The lower-left corner structure marked "JR" is Akihabara Station. The black rectangle near the center of the map is Try Amusement Tower (which is right next door to J-Game, tsukaesugi's favorite game center). The black square in the upper-right corner is the Try PCB shop. At the right edge of the map you'll see a shop named "RYOBI" -- just to the left of that (on the other side of the alley) is the building that houses the Mak-Japan PCB shop (those of you who read my posts in this thread will recall my undying love for this particular PCB shop). The grey strip running left to right across the center of the map (labelled ’†‰›’Ê‚è ) is the Chuuoudori, the main road thru the center of Electric Town. The grey square just above the last 2 characters in Chuuoudori is the location of the Yamagiwa Soft building where the fire occurred.

The text in the article on that first page seems to indicate that there were no injuries, but perhaps tsukaesugi or beelzebubble (or one of our other members living in Japan) could translate some more details for us, or cull some further information from other Japanese news sites.

--Chris

Looks like LAOX was closed for the fire. Glad it didn't burn down, it's my favorite "mainstream" game store.

Japan time a bit after 1pm, a fire started at the yamagiwa soft store in akihabara's chuuou street. the whole 8 floors building was covered by smoke.

At the fire outbreak, the vigor of flames was tremendous, Yamagiwa soft store main business of CD, DVDs and such materials produced a specific bad smell wrapping the whole chuuou street and for a while the center of akihabara became verry agitated.

Yet, it seems that nobody escaped wounded.

----
i say wow... hopefully no wounded ...

I remember that place. I went there a few times. Any word on what caused it? Electrical more than likely right?

nope, no info yet about the cause. We ll see tomorrow...

BarfHappy said:

Yet, it seems that nobody escaped wounded.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the translation BarfHappy (my kanji strength lies in kanji commonly found in video game mooks and kouryakubon; more conversational / day-to-day kanji (like one would find in a newspaper article) tend to be a bit daunting for me if I don't have my copy of The New Nelson nearby (Megaton Jisho!)). I'm assuming that this last part means that everyone escaped the building without suffering injuries, right? Thanks again.

--Chris

yep that s it, nobody showed up as beeing injured... that s a great thing.

my kanji dictionary is the reikai gakushuu kanji jiten doraemon edition

looks kiddish but it s really great (complete and verry clear definitions -fully in japanese though-)

Sooooooo scary. I almost went there at noon to do some shopping and then decided to stay on the train and go somewhere else. It doesnt suprise me that there would be a fire there, half the buildings have exposed wiring and what looks like tons of building code violations. Im scared to take the elevators there....