These Easyled fixtures are a bit glary. I heard they don't have any seals, so they collect dust.

Bad efficiency, particularly due to high leak of energy into useless near-IR I guess...

@James: How dysprosium have better CRI, life and optical performance? At the very high pressure of the indium, the spectrum should be a molecular continuous spectrum, with only dips in the blue by the cold indium vapour pressure.

Fantastic, you will love it!  It is 20 years since I worked for Iwasaki over there so some places below may have changed, but I was last there very briefly about 5 years ago and there was still a great selection of lamp shops.

As others have mentioned, Akihabara Electric Town is probably your best bet to find interesting old lighting shops.  Very easy to get to, just one stop on the Yamanote metro green line from Ueno central station in Tokyo.

Yodobashi Camera chainstores have an excellent selection of all modern lamps at perhaps the best prices.  Probably you can still find some of the unique Japanese CFLs there, along with their unusual twin-tube circlines, the square circlines, flattened-section circlines, and flat spiral high wattage fluorescents which began to take over just before the LED era.

Yamagiwa lighting stores also had a good selection.  Their main business is lighting fixtures, often high-end architectural and very expensive things, and to help customers keep old fixtures alive they used to be renowned for their excellent stocks of older incandescents, halogen and lower wattage HID types - although pretty expensive.

By far the most interesting for me though, were the small lamp and electronics markets.  Akihabara is full of big chain stores that occupy most of the street frontage - but in between their huge and grossly over-lit entrances you can find narrow corridors, sometimes nothing more than just a staircase or escalator at street level, that extends backwards or upwards.  It may feel like you are taking your life into your own hands to disappear into those entrances, but I can highly recommend exploring some of those!  Those are the places that do not earn big profits and cannot afford big street entrances, and where you find the best deals as well as the oldest stocks.  Sometimes it can be a bit hit and miss, it could be just a long corridor to a tiny smoky and room selling some kind of highly specialised obsolete electronic components.  But other times it will open out into a cavernous space rammed full of tiny electronics stalls.  The best ones to look out for are the entrances with undecipherable signs of text annotated with eg 2F, 3F, ... 7F etc - denoting the number of floors of markets that are stacked above the entrance, and here you can almost always find a few stands inside with some kind of older lighting products - as well as a mass of vintage electronics, which I also find fascinating to see.

There are also two fantastic small lamp shops I remember, but they were run by old Japanese gentelemen who even 25 years ago looked as though they should be retired so I am afraid that one day soon they may disappear.  The first is Koto Electric  This guy still had carbon filament lamps and many older HID in stock last time I was there.  See Google location and scroll through the photos at the link.  IT seems the link does not work fully, you may have to click Back at upper left, and then click on the thumbnails again to see all.

Another good one was Mitsuwa Denki but looking at these photos it seems they Ledified a lot (same thing again, click Back, then again choose Mitsuwa Denki from the list, and then Photos).

Akizuki has a lot of second hand old electronics, highly variable, I never found too much but worth trying.  So popular it seems they often have a queue on the street to get inside!  I was in touch with the owner by email a year or two ago, because he also gets stocks of older LEDs from the 70s-80s-90s, which I find quite interesting.  But he did not have any stock left of the world's first white LED from Nichia of 1996 which I was looking for!

Marutsu I remember the name well but looking at these photos it seems they also modernised now and specialise in electronic components more.  If I remember rightly they had 3 different shops in Akihabara so it could be that they have lighting at another location.

It would be worth you pinging a message to Al Martin, if he does not reply here.  He was in Japan much more recently and found a great place that sold many older HID lamps, which I do not remember visiting myself.  Perhaps he would have more details.

Yeah, maybe.
It might just be one of those things that's lost in time.

According to http://www.simoncornwell.com/lighting/manufact/atlas/fullrange/l1.htm (section "alpha eight"), it may be possible that the lanterns in the photo may have been a prototype that pre-dated the Alpha 8. The applicable quote states:

Originally designed as a special lantern for the Marble Arch relighting scheme at the experimental height of 30'. (This was outside of the specifications at the time but it was one of many experimental installations of high-power lanterns at heights higher than 25' which anticipated the new specification BSCP 1004:1963).

I also found alternate views of the lanterns. The first one is from Alamy, and the other from a eBay listing:

• https://www.alamy.com/the-london-hilton-hotel-in-park-lane-which-was-opened-by-mrs-reginald-maudling-wife-of-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequer-yesterday-18th-april-1963-image623682167.html
• https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324742920575

It appears that Thorn Electrical Industries may have been asked by Westminster City Council to come up with more powerful lighting for the Park Lane widening. Unlike the Alpha 8, replacing the lamps may have required removing the bowl, instead of opening the hatch on the top of the canopy.

I think most general consumers simply do not care about quality of light - but like you I receive similar comments when people visit my home (even being unaware of my interest) that the rooms are extremely well lit with unusual warmth.  People do not realise how good lighting can be until experiencing it. 

I am especially pleased to hear such reactions since in fact now eliminating virtually all incandescents from my home lighting.  But I made my own LED retrofits with colour rendering index above 97, and copying the real circa 2500K of low wattage incandescents vs the unpleasantly high 2700K that was ubiquitously claimed for almost all GLS lamps - but in practice applied only to the higher wattages.  I find it unfortunate that the big manufacturers all copied that 2700K spec for their LED retrofits - and in many cases are in fact closer to 2800K so as to make a small cost saving and efficacy boost.  I have tried pushing the lower CCT and higher CRI versions but since the average consumer has no idea what that means, and manufacturers also don’t want to promote it due to the higher cost and lower efficacy, the quality of home lighting has for most people suffered a massive backward step since the LED revolution.

If it is marked Made in USA then at Solon, Ohio.  Afterwards in India.

Because HMI had better colour rendering, efficacy, life, consistency and optical performance

Although the first six foot tube was introduced by GE of America in 1944 as part of its Slimline T8 series, it remained a rather uncommon size.

The first preheat cathode six foot tube was introduced by British Lighting Industries (a division of Thorn Lighting) in 1966 under the Atlas Super Six name.  It had a T12 diameter and was rated 85 Watts.  BLI introduced it as new standard with highly optimised performance of the total lighting system, and it was originally intended that this size should become the dominant tube for the British fluorescent market.  Previously the highest runners in Britain had been the 5ft 80W tube, and after 1956 the 8ft 125W.  Both were highly loaded tubes that offered impressively high light output for industrial and commercial applications, but that made them rather inefficient - their loading being similar to the American HO (high output) tubes introduced by GE in 1952.  That situation was partially overcome in 1961 when BLI introduced the new standard of the 8ft 85W tube.  That delivered an extremely impressive boost in lighting efficiency - but as noted by RRK such long tubes were considered unwieldy and difficult to handle.

The compromise of 1966 was to introduce the 6ft 85W tube as an intermediate model that satisfied the following criteria:
- high light output suitable for industrial and commercial applications
- high efficacy to attain lowest cost of operational ownership
- the maximum length tube that could strike easily on the British 240V mains supply, without expensive or complex control gear such as autotransformer ballasts, or the capacitive ballast as used for the 8ft 125W tube

The 6ft 85W indeed quickly became one of the most popular sizes in Britain but curiously it did not enjoy the same success in other countries.  As RRK also already pointed out, for low voltage countries in the Americas it would not be an advantage, because the high tube voltage would require a greater open circuit voltage of the autotransformer ballasts, resulting in greater size, weight, cost, and electrical losses of the ballasts.  In other European countries it was also not adopted because their mains voltage of 220V was slightly too low to ensure reliable starting of the six foot tube, which was not a problem on the British 240V mains.  As such, the six foot tube standard remained almost exclusively limited to the UK and other 240-250-260V countries around the world.  Another restriction was that in continental Europe Osram and Philips had recently constructed new high speed tube production machinery - but not having foreseen the six foot development and also not having ever made the 8ft tubes in significant volumes, they built their lines to handle a maximum tube length of 5ft.  It was therefore commercially very difficult for them to follow the Thorn lead in the new 6ft business.

Two years later in 1968, Thorn made another major development with the introduction of its "Superwhite" phosphor.  That delivered an almost unprecedented boost of 6% in luminous efficacy, and allowed the 6ft tubes to rival even the 8ft 85W in total system efficacy.  The same phosphor was not attractive to apply on 8ft tubes because those already delivered enough light, and the high cost of the new material would have made them too expensive on a longer tube.  Also in 1968 Thorn developed a remarkably efficient new semi-resonant-starting ballast for the 6ft 85W tube, which eliminated flicker on startup and greatly extended lamp life.  These two achievements further cemented the 6ft 85W as the leading British tube.

Following the global Energy Crisis of the early 1970s, in 1973-74 Thorn re-rated the 6ft T12 from 85W to a dual-rated 75/85W tube.  New ballasts were introduced to run the tube at slightly lower current, which caused a drop of 10W in power consumption but due to the lower power loading, the decrease in light output was much less significant.  Thereafter, most new 6ft installations used the newer 75W ballasts.

Finally, following Thorn's 1975 introduction of the first Krypton-filled T12 energy-saving tube in Europe, and especially after Philips' 1978 extension of the Krypton technology to the new T8 formats as T12 retrofits (first in 4ft 36W, then 2ft 18W and 5ft 58W), it was a logical step for Thorn to apply the same principle to its 6ft tubes.  That resulted in the introduction of the 6ft T8 70W krypton lamp.  Like its 6ft T12 predecessors, it remained almost exclusively used in countries having mains voltages of 240V or higher.