秋葉原

The world capital of electronics is named after a fire god — because the whole district burned down first. Twist: the god was never actually enshrined there — and a chronicler wrote the mistake down as it was happening.

After a great fire in 1869 destroyed 1,100 houses, the government cleared a 9,000-tsubo firebreak and built a shrine to three fire-quelling deities — officially named Chinka-sha. But locals assumed it enshrined Akiba, the wildly popular fire-protection deity of the era — a mistake so widespread that the chronicler Saitō Gesshin recorded it at the time, noting he wrote it down precisely because so many people had it wrong. The field's nickname, Akiba-no-hara, is said to have grown out of that misreading. The nickname stuck, the railway adopted it in 1890 — and the district ended up named after a god who was never actually there.

Low ground along the Kanda River: a district of dense wooden housing hit repeatedly by great fires through the Edo and Meiji eras.