Akihabara Junk and Electronic Parts: What Is Left, and What Time It Opens

Akihabara was an electronics parts market for forty years before it was an anime district, and that market is still there — four levels of it, two minutes from the station. But it is not what English guides describe. Several of the shops they name have closed since 2024, the building’s own website contradicts itself about how many tenants it has, and one of the best shops is open from three in the afternoon until six.

This is what is actually open, with the hours and closed days each shop publishes itself, checked in September 2026. If you take one thing from this page, take the closed days.

🔴 The thing that ruins this trip

The Tokyo Radio Depart publishes building hours of 10:00–19:00 and then explicitly tells you not to rely on them — each shop sets its own. It is right to. Here is the actual spread inside one small building:

• et al. (B1, junk and used PCs) — 15:00–18:00. Three hours a day.
• General Trans (B1, valve-amp transformers) — 12:00–17:00, and only Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
• Hasegawa Vacuum Tubes (2F) — 12:00–17:00, Tuesday to Saturday. Closed Sunday, Monday and public holidays.
• San-ei Denki (3F, imported tubes) — 10:30–17:00 on weekdays; at weekends it opens one day, and which day is decided by a calendar posted in the shop.
• Shigezone (1F, Shenzhen imports) — Mon/Wed/Fri 12:30–19:00, Sat/Sun/holidays 11:30–19:00. Closed Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• AKIBAJUNKS (3F) — 11:00–18:00, closed Mondays and Thursdays, plus irregular days.
• Sakuraya Denki (2F, vintage capacitors) — 11:30–18:30, open every day of the year.

Go on a weekday afternoon. A Sunday or Monday visit finds much of the second and third floors shuttered, and a morning visit finds the basement shut.

1. Tokyo Radio Depart — the building the district is built around

1-10-11 Sotokanda. B1F to 3F. Building hours 10:00–19:00, but see above. Two minutes from the JR Electric Town exit, along the elevated line.

Opened on 25 February 1950 and still doing the same thing: a six-storey building whose lower four levels are subdivided into small independent component shops. The operator’s own site says about 36 shops; its own floor map lists about 27. Use the floor map — the higher figure has not kept up with the closures.

B1F — junk, transformers, used PCs

The floor English guides mean when they say “junk”. Akihabara Final Disposal Site (the shop’s actual name) buys and sells broken PC junk; et al. does used PCs and junk in a three-hour window; General Trans is a transformer specialist — power, output and choke transformers for valve amplifiers — which calls itself “the transformer shop in the basement food hall”.

1F — general components, cases, LEDs

Okuzawa is a specialist in cases, chassis and racks; Parts Land sells capacitors, switches, resistors and LED tape, 10:00–19:00, closed roughly two Sundays a month; Kobayashi Denki Shokai does general components, 10:00–18:00 (16:00 on Saturdays), closed Sundays and holidays. Micro Power Laboratory is the unusual one: microwave and RF — coaxial adapters, attenuators, circulators, waveguide converters and horn antennas — open 11:00–17:00.

Shigezone is the modern one. It imports switches, boards, sensors and microcontrollers directly from Shenzhen, which is the twenty-first-century version of what this whole building used to be.

2F — audio, vacuum tubes, enclosures

The floor to come for if you build amplifiers. Hasegawa is a vacuum tube specialist (its parent company has been in tubes for over seventy years). Sakuraya Denki sells vintage Japanese and foreign capacitors sorted by type — electrolytic, oil, mica, paper, film, ceramic — and is the one shop here open every single day. Kaijin Musen does resistors, capacitors and audio components; SS Musen sells enclosures and raw aluminium, brass, copper and stainless over the counter.

And Maywa Denki, the artist unit, has its own shop on this floor selling what it calls nonsense machines. It has no function whatsoever and it is one of the best things in the building. Closed Tuesdays.

3F — imported and specialist components

San-ei Denki imports vacuum tubes and components from around the world — the best lead in Tokyo for tubes you cannot get at home, and the shop with the most awkward opening hours in this article. Saito Denki Shokai does RF connectors, relays and ferrite cores. AKIBAJUNKS does used PCs, parts and junk.

2. Radio Center — open, and we cannot tell you when

The row of stalls under the JR viaduct, and the oldest surviving piece of this district. It is still trading. Beyond that we are not going to pretend.

Its official website was last updated, by its own copyright line, in 2005. It publishes no address, no opening hours, no closed days and no shop count, and its tenant list still shows a shop that closed in March 2026. Any English guide quoting Radio Center opening hours is quoting something it did not get from Radio Center.

Practical advice: go on a weekday between 10:00 and 18:00 and accept that individual stalls will be shut. And one correction — there is no announced redevelopment of the Radio Center arch. We searched JR East’s own releases; nothing. The story people are thinking of is Akihabara Radio Store, a different building under the same viaduct, which closed in November 2013 after 64 years — which is also why there are fewer stalls under the tracks than older guides describe.

3. Akizuki Denshi — the one that is easy

1-8-3 Sotokanda, Nomizu Building 1F and 2F. 11:00–18:00, open every day including public holidays.

Semiconductors, ICs, LEDs, microcontrollers, transistors, switches, connectors, power supplies and kits, over two floors, and — unlike almost everything else here — self-service: you take a basket and pick things off the shelf. If you have never bought components in Japan, start here rather than at a counter where you have to name the part.

Practical note the shop makes itself: no car parking and no bicycle parking.

4. Junk Comfull — junk PCs, sold as junk

3-6-11 Sotokanda, Kohiyama Building 1F. Weekdays 16:00–19:00; weekends and holidays 12:00–19:00. 🔴 Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Junk PCs and parts with no warranty, which is stated plainly rather than buried. Opened in 2024, so it is newer than most guides. The three-hour weekday window is the same trap as the Radio Depart basement — this is an evening shop on weekdays and an afternoon shop at the weekend.

🔴 The chain is PC Comfull, not “PC Combo”, which is a name that circulates in English listings and belongs to nothing.

5. The chains, and which branch is the one you want

• Sengoku Denshou Akihabara Main Store — 1-8-6 Sotokanda, Maruwa Building, B1 to 3F. 11:00–19:00, closed only 31 December to 3 January. Four levels of electronic components, screws, tools, cases, cables, kits and 3D-printer supplies. This is the single easiest serious parts shop in Akihabara to visit — it keeps ordinary hours, it is open almost every day of the year, and it is a minute from the Radio Depart.
• Sengoku Denshou Akihabara New No.2 — 1-9-9 Sotokanda, Uchida Building, 1F and 2F, same hours. Narrower and more interesting: arcade-stick parts, guitar parts, and video, audio and charging cables. If you are building a custom arcade controller, this is the address — and it is the one shop that connects this article to both our arcade guide and our Ochanomizu instrument guide.
• Akibaoo Zero — 1-8-10 Sotokanda, Bauhaus 1F. Weekdays 11:00–20:00; Saturdays, Sundays and holidays 10:30–19:30. The flagship of a cheap-and-cheerful chain: memory and media, PC supplies, small appliances, cables, snacks, imported oddities and toys, all at the bottom of the price range. Not a components shop — go here for the cable you forgot, not the capacitor. Note: its No.1 store at 3-1-12 Sotokanda is currently closed for renovation, and the chain’s own site says both “ten Akihabara stores” and “eight” on different pages.
• Janpara Akihabara No.2 — 4-4-7 Sotokanda, B1/1F/2F, 11:00–19:30, open every day. The basement is the parts floor: motherboards, CPUs, memory, SSDs, graphics cards, monitors, desktops, VR headsets. Janpara has six Akihabara branches and this is the only one that is really a parts shop — the chain is now overwhelmingly used smartphones, whatever guides say.
• PC Koubou Akihabara Parts Building — 3-4-15 Sotokanda, 1F and 2F, 11:00–20:00, open every day. PC components, with a junk corner.
• Sofmap AKIBA PC & Digital — 3-13-12 Sotokanda, IMY Building, 11:00–20:00. Eight floors, but for this purpose only 2F matters: CPUs, motherboards, memory, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards, power supplies, cases. Sofmap AKIBA U-SHOP (3-14-6) is the used and refurbished one.
• Wakamatsu Tsusho — 1-15-16 Sotokanda, Radio Kaikan 5F, 10:00–19:00 (18:30 on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays). Transistors, ICs, diodes, resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes, transformers, memory and kits — over 80,000 lines. This is the last serious parts shop inside Radio Kaikan; the rest of that building is anime, idol goods and trading cards now.
• Toyo Keisokki “Keisokuki Land” — 1-3-12 Sotokanda, 1F, 10:00–18:30, open every day except New Year. Used measuring instruments, with a warranty — oscilloscopes and the like. Nothing else on this page sells test gear you can trust.

What has closed since 2024

This district is contracting, and the guides have not caught up. All of the following are confirmed from the shops’ own pages or accounts:

• Sengoku Denshou closed its Akihabara No.2 store and its Radio Depart store — the operator’s own pages for both are now titled “closed”. Sengoku itself has not left Akihabara: it consolidated into the four-floor main store at 1-8-6 and a new No.2 at 1-9-9 (both listed above). But the Radio Depart lost one of its best-known tenants, and guides still send people to the wrong two addresses.
• Kadota Musen Denki (3F) closed on 20 May 2026. The company’s own account is now literally named after the closing date, and it is gone from the Radio Depart floor map.
• Ina Denki (3F), a battery specialist of about sixty years, ended retail operations in 2026. Also gone from the official floor map.
• Konan Denki, an IC and transistor veteran, closed at the end of April 2024.
• Yamamoto Musen’s electrical-materials shop in Radio Center closed on 20 March 2026, and its Chuo-dori branch in February 2024. Radio Center’s own website still lists it as trading.
• Radio Kaikan closed the entire building for statutory inspection on 4 June 2024, and posts single-tenant closures most months. Check before you go for one specific shop.

What the listing sites get wrong

• 🔴 The Radio Depart’s official domain in most English guides does not exist. The address they print, radiodepart.com, does not resolve at all. The real site is tokyoradiodepart.co.jp.
• “About 40 shops” — the building’s own inflated figure is 36 and its own floor map shows about 27. Both are on the same website.
• “Open daily 10:00–19:00” — the building disclaims those hours on the same page it prints them, and its tenants range from three hours a day to every day of the year.
• “Parts sold by the bag”, “Soviet and military surplus” — these appear in English coverage and no official source supports either. We looked.
• Janpara as a junk-and-parts chain — five of its six Akihabara branches sell used phones and laptops.
• 🔴 We could not verify tax-free status for a single shop in this article. Not one parts shop publishes any tax-free information. Assume you are paying tax; if it matters, ask before you buy. Our guide to the November 2026 changes explains what happens to the system in any case.

Practical notes

• Weekday afternoon, and nothing else. It is worth repeating: this is the only reliable window.
• Bring the part, or a photo of it. Almost nothing here is self-service — Akizuki is the exception. At a counter shop you point.
• Cash. Several of these are one-person shops in a 1950 building. Do not assume a card reader.
• It is two minutes from the arcades and the card shops. If the rest of your party is not interested, the arcade guide and the card shop guide cover what they can do while you are in the basement.
• If you find something you cannot carry or cannot buy in person, Buyee bids and buys on Yahoo! Auctions and Mercari on your behalf and forwards the parcel abroad.
• Check on the day. Four shops in this district closed between 2024 and 2026, and the buildings’ own websites have not all noticed. A prepaid Japanese eSIM is the least painful way to read a Japanese shop page while standing in the corridor.

Nearby

This is the oldest layer of Akihabara and the rest of the district sits on top of it. Our retro game shop guide covers buying old software rather than components, the arcade guide covers the four game centres including the nine-floor one that replaced the red GiGO building, and the Gunpla guide covers model kits. For the same “what did this district used to be” feeling somewhere else, Jimbocho is two stops away and Ochanomizu is next to it.