Akihabara: images of a fleeting world

I should have posted the following story some while ago, for I visited Akihabara about two weeks ago on the last evening Ignas spend in Tokyo. But you know how those things go. Well, I really wanted to tell about this, so now at last...
Maybe the most shocking revelation about Japanese society I experienced until now was in Akihabara. This part of Tokyo is known for two things: electronics and manga(comic books)/anime (the animated version) related products. Maybe innocent at first sight, but especially the second category has more gloomy sides to it than Pokemon and Dragonball Z show. Of course I knew about it: the phenomenon of pornographic manga and anime known as hentai is well known around the world. But how much different is that from all those other sex-magazines that are sold in every country? Well, here the difference between pornographic, erotic and normal (also kid's) anime is not all that clear. While walking through a store with anime-action figures I came across dolls of famous anime series like Naruto and Trigun and dolls displaying sexual activities, including violent bondage/SM like figures. At one display the mechs from futuristic anime-series were standing right next to those explicit figures. It also made me wonder why so many anime-characters have such erotic features like short skirts and tight shirts, even in child's/teenage kid's series. Maybe the target audience of these series is not limited to kids, and the action figures also collected by middle aged salary-man with socially unaccepted sexual preferences. The existence of such an audience was confirmed when I walked into a store that seemed to be selling regular videogames and DVD's. Next to the department of anime DVD's there was lots of erotic material, including DVD's with young children on the cover, their young age clearly indicated to boost sales (between 8 and 12 years old). Apparently this was no explicit sexual material - on a tv in the store they showed one such DVD with a young girl playing in some garden, wearing normal clothes or a school-uniform - but the fact that these DVD's where stacked next to DVD's that were actually explicitly erotic makes their function clear: to satisfy the fantasies of Japanese men. After seeing how many of such DVD's they were selling there me and Ignas walked to the exit of the store - and next to the door there was a staircase leading to the 2nd floor with the indication "adult section". So what do they consider the stuff that was on the first floor?!
We also came along a more innocent, but also very strange anime-phenomenon: at the entrance of a pachinko (gambling) parlor two girls in anime-character outfit were enthousiasticly and synchronicly dancing to some happy song, with some middle aged man standing around watching them and clapping their hands - it just didn't seem right.
Japanese anime is well known for the explicit violent and sexual scenes, but I never expected it to be so openly displayed in combination with more innocent anime (that seems less innocent to me now though). Don't they mind young kids seeing all that stuff? Or don't young kids come there to buy action figures? But then what are the childish (but erotic) dolls doing there? It's really disturbing seeing those genres next to each other, apparently not regarded as so much separated as I liked to see it.
Apart from those anime/manga erotics there are many places where you can watch sexvideo's or rather DVD's all over Tokyo. So not just in quaters with a certain reputation like Kabukicho or Ikebukuro, but also around the corner of Ueno park with all it's museums, and here near the station of Takadanobaba in this student's quarter. I'm wondering whether this is a good, innocent way for men to get rid of their stress and sexual desires or whether it indicates how dirty-minded many Japanese men are, and maybe these anime or movies inspire them to do things they would normally not have thought of. I hope my first assumption is true, but that would mean they don't need those DVD's to be inspired to such twisted thoughts and they already have those desires "naturally". One more evidence of such perverse desires can be seen on the website http://japundit.com/archives/2005/10/06/1311/ By the way, it's an article without any explicit material so don't be afraid.
So this is also a part of the society I live in now, one of its darker sides.