As the Zeon forces gather, Momo arranges a handful of trading cards (specially purchased for the game) on the flat, magnetic surface of his machine. He physically manipulates the cards to control his robot and weapons on the screen. Firing a few missiles, he deftly defeats the Zeon threat, and adds yet another win to a remarkable history of 585 victories. At about $2 a game, Momo estimates he’s spent $2,000 in the last six months. But it’s worth it. “The more you win, the more experience and credibility you gain among other Gundam fans for being an old hand,” he says.
Welcome to the arcades of Tokyo. In Asia and particularly Japan, video game rooms not only live, but thrive. There are 9,500 arcades in the country with more than 445,000 game machines made by Japanese companies like Namco and Capcom, says Masumi Akagi, publisher of Japan’s Game Publisher magazine. In the U.S. of course, the story is much different—arcades are a rapidly dying breed with only about 3,000 in operation down from 10,000 a decade ago. Though the popularity of home video systems like the PlayStation contributed to the decline, Akagi says that execs at U.S. companies like Midway and Atari simply couldn’t see the future in arcades and “abandoned the coin-operated business.”
Hopping from arcade to arcade in the neon-lit Shibuya district was something of a homecoming for me. I grew up on Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede. Though I can’t grasp the Japanese way of counting, I still remember the precise way to defeat Bald Bull in the old boxing game Punch Out. Those old-school games are nowhere to be seen in Japan today. The modern arcade is an exotic, sensory-overload, nearly impenetrable to foreigners. It is not just a palace of entertainment, but a collection of obsessive subcultures.
Start on the first floor of any Japanese arcade. Row upon row of “crane machines” greet you—or as the Japanese call them, UFO Catchers. Try your luck at manipulating the claw to pick up stuffed animals, keychains, various toys and some really weird stuff, like Pink-Panther-brand canned bread. In several flavors, including milk.
Past the crane games, the ground floors are usually home to rows and rows of purikura , or print club machines, popular with Japanese schoolgirls. They rush into these color photo booths after school or on the weekend, take their pictures with friends, then digitally color or inscribe messages on their images. Players can then send the photos to their mobile phones, print them out and trade them with friends, or in some cases, submit them to modeling or reality-TV contests. Kazuki and Mizuki, two high school sophomores at a Shibuya arcade, told us they play purikura about once a week to capture “memories.” How many friends’ photos are in their collection? “About 100,” said Kazuki. “What? You have much more than that” said Mizuki.
Venture upstairs, and the light becomes dimmer, the cacophony louder. The air, only a fraction of which is oxygen, stinks of cigarettes and concentration. There are slightly familiar fighting games, quiz games and music games where you play an instrument like drums, guitar, even DJ turntables, to a rapid fire beat. Dancing games popular in the United States, like Dance Dance Revolution, appear passé.
I saw exactly one Tetris machine, and it appeared lonely. Instead, the upper floors of the arcades were dominated by multiplayer card games, like Momo’s Gundam battle. Players compete against each other on networked terminals in virtual baseball, soccer, tennis, mah-jong and horseracing, each with their own fanatical followings. Player rankings are stored online. You buy the playing cards at any toy store—they resemble old baseball trading cards—and success in the game improves their value. In each arcade, there are also bulletin boards for players seeking to trade cards. “I want an extra Kawasaki [a player]. I will give up an extra Nioka. Let’s exchange,” read a note that “Oyabi” had taped in one Shibuya arcade.
Arcade baseball can’t hold a bat to Sega’s The Great Battle of Three Countries, or Sangokushi Trisen , another card-type game based on the wars of medieval China. I can honestly say I had no idea what was going on, except that players—who lined up for the busy machines in one Shibuya arcade—manipulated their virtual armies and weapons with playing cards on a magnetic surface, in the same way Momo did with Gundam. We talked to one college-age player, Maseki, who had an iPod stuffed in his shirt pocket and a Kirin beer in his hand. He said he plays about twice a month at about $3 a game, though the stack of character cards in his hand betrays a deeper addiction. “I can learn all the background and histories of the characters,” he said, adding he also reads manga related to the Sangokushi saga.
Not content to simply survey the action, I played a bit too. I tried my hand at the multiplayer fighting game Dark Resurrection and picked as my virtual warrior a white polar bear. I played the computer and was drubbed by a mohawked fighter who resembles The Rock. My Japanese interpreter, fighting as a boxing-gloved Kangaroo with a snowboard on its back and scuba fins on its feet, was defeated in the game by a tattooed girl.
So this is what we are missing in America, with our arcades abandoned by the big entertainment and game companies and converted into Baby Gaps. Japan’s “quarter kids” have grown up and are still having fun.
Yet there’s evidence that the country is ambivalent about its arcades. Japan is facing a looming demographic nightmare. With an increasing elderly population and a decreasing birth rate, there simply won’t be enough workers to support the senior population. At the same time, young people dubbed neets (who live with their parents and refuse to get jobs), and freeters (who only have part-time work) are much-discussed social groups who exacerbate the population and workforce imbalance.
Unsurprisingly, job-listing pamphlets litter the entrances of many Tokyo arcades. In one Shibuya game room, we saw two students smiling from a public service poster from the National Police Agency, which regulates arcades as well as Pachinko (a gambling game played with steel marbles) and slot machine parlors, with which they are often paired. MANY ADULTS CARE FOR YOU, the poster read. NOW OUR FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS. YOU DO NOT BELONG ONLY TO YOURSELF. YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY FOR ALL OF US.
Adults want Japanese kids to leave the arcades, go to work and save the country. But they’re too busy saving the world, one Gundam battle at a time.
Brad Stone will be writing from Tokyo this summer on a Japan Society Media Fellowship
