That said, I'm not quite sure where I'd locate it. Akihabara would have been a shoo-in but that's been taken over by the anime crowd. Kawasaki, perhaps?
There is a passage in the book with a potential explanation:
“There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins.”
But I've never been able to find a corroborated connection between Chiba and the Yakuza, though the extent of my looking has been nothing more than some desultory google searches.
In general, they're also far less powerful than breathless Western reporting (including Gibson's portrayal) tends to make them out to be, in part thanks to a persistent multi-decade police crackdown.
Anecdotally, I know someone who owned a house in Okazaki (a city outside of Nagoya). Someone decided they wanted the land for a construction project, so they resorted to threats to get him to move- such as smashing his car windows. No way that was a random punk smashing windows- when I lived in Okazaki, a defaced public bathroom would make the local news. Classic Yakuza tactic, and unfortunately he ended up moving because of it.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga
"Chronologically speaking, the moment Gibson shifts emphasis from cyberspace to junkyard was noticed when he paid the first visit to Japan in the winter of 1988. Celebrating the completion of the Cyberspace Trilogy, we had a welcome party for him at an ethnic restaurant called Sunda located just in front of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in Jinnan, Shibuya ward, Tokyo"
just like he didnt know anything about computers while writing about cyberspace
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson...
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful."
The truth when he says "I didn't know anything about computers" is probably more akin to "I didn't personally use computers. I did conduct deep and comprehensive research on their characteristics and use by others."
When he was blogging for All Tomorrow's Parties, the amount of esoterica and research he apparently read every day was staggering.
Although I think a huge amount of the traction it got was a journalistic in-approval of "See, person who writes technofuturism hates technology."
(I've also heard that the chemistry/pharmacology in Neuromancer also makes sense in a fairly detailed way, but I'm not qualified to assess this personally.)
>> non-fiction magazines can help the SF writer and reader escape genre stereotypes and come to grips with the real social and technical issues of the human future. ~~ V.O.
Prob not a weighty opinion, but I would probably look around Osaka, the idea of Nishinari mainly. But in general, the mercantile legacy of Osaka just feels more fitting to paint a "anything for a price" kind of dystopia.
And admittedly, I would say a big part of why I think that is that I think the real correct answer is just Ghost in the Shell's Niihama: Borrow heavily from Hong Kong, except it's in Osaka Bay or Tokushima (not sure exactly which, I always thought it was Osaka, but google has turned up both).
I visited Japan a few times, and during the pandemic I spent 3 months in Kyoto. It was an absolutely incredible experience that I will never forget.
I even started to learn some basic Japanese - ten times, maybe? And of course gave up every time :(
One day I'll visit again, and I hope I'll meet tens of people like you, and listen to stories and details like the one in your comment.
Akihabara has shifted from electronics to anime/gaming, but that's a fairly natural progression and it's still very geeky/otaku, just in a different way.
http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/1983-akihabara-japan-cas...
昭和６１年の秋葉原（※別に高画質版あります） Akihabara 1986 (240p Low quality version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6zmIe0tJxE
Fun To See What Was For Sale In 1993 Tokyo Electronics District https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNoVD-ljVBM
Gibson made stuff up as any sf writer does. He never used a computer before writing Neuromancer, and he visited Japan for the first time in 1988, 4 years after first novel release.